Barbra Streisand, Céline Dion – Tell Him

It happened because of an Oscar-night mix-up: Streisand backed out of singing her own nominated song, Céline Dion stepped in to cover for her — and the two decided they had to record together.

The most celebrated duet of two of the biggest voices in popular music began with a scheduling problem at the Academy Awards. At the 1997 ceremony, Barbra Streisand was set to perform I Finally Found Someone, her Oscar-nominated duet with Bryan Adams from The Mirror Has Two Faces — then declined. Céline Dion was asked to step in and sing it in her place, and did. When Streisand had a change of heart and wanted the spot back, it was already taken. Out of that near-miss came something better: the two singers decided they should record together for real.

Keep watching: Céline Dion – My Heart Will Go On · explore more →

The vehicle they chose was Tell Him, a lush, building ballad written specifically for them by an A-list team: producer David Foster, his then-wife Linda Thompson, and Walter Afanasieff. Thompson and Foster had already co-written Whitney Houston’s I Have Nothing; Afanasieff, that very same year, co-wrote and produced Dion’s My Heart Will Go On. The song was conceived as the lead single for both women’s forthcoming 1997 albums — Streisand’s Higher Ground and Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love — a rare case of one single launching two records at once.

The lyric stages a conversation between generations: a younger woman, sung by Dion, afraid to confess her love, and an older, wiser voice, Streisand’s, urging her to speak her heart. It is a setup tailor-made for two singers a generation apart, and they lean into it — Dion all soaring uncertainty, Streisand all reassuring command, their voices circling and finally joining.

Two voices that never actually sang in the same room

Here is the detail that surprises people. For all the chemistry on screen, Streisand and Dion recorded their parts separately and lip-synced together for the cameras. The music video, beautifully shot in Los Angeles, was actually filmed as part of a Céline Dion documentary project for her label, showing the two stars chatting with the songwriters before performing the song. It premiered on VH1 on October 24, 1997. The illusion is seamless — two divas, one microphone, one moment — built from parts assembled with the same studio craft that defined Foster and Afanasieff’s golden-age balladry.

The record did what it was built to do. Tell Him reached number 3 in the United Kingdom, became a top-10 hit across Europe and Australia, and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. Nearly three decades on, it endures as one of the great power-ballad summit meetings — a song that exists at all only because of one of show business’s happiest accidents, and a reminder that the best collaborations are sometimes the ones nobody planned.