Montreal -- AFTER triumphant appearances at the Grammys, Oscars and Olympics, Celine Dion insinuated herself ever deeper into the American consciousness this week with a cameo on The Nanny, a run-of-the-mill CBS TV sitcom.

This rather unremarkable feat -- at least compared to the performance of pop music's reigning princess before a potential 3.5 billion viewers at the opening of the Atlanta Games -- was nevertheless much remarked upon in Quebec. In fact, just about anything Ms. Dion does spawns reams of television footage, scores of newspaper articles and an assortment of magazine covers in her native province. To Quebeckers, whose fixation with pop culture has always made them the most American of Canadians, she is realizing the American dream and taking them along for the fabulous ride.

The few French phrases that Ms. Dion reserved for her Quebecois fans during her acceptance speech at the Grammy Awards in February, uttered in a joual inaccessible to almost everyone but her six million French-speaking compatriots, validated their unique and enduring culture. In front of the United States and the world, Ms. Dion proved to Quebeckers that they exist.

In the star-crazed principality of Quebec, it was worth more than a trillion distinct-society clauses.

Pop culture -- like politics -- is approached with cult-like fervour in Quebec. With its flourishing home-grown music and television industries, and its thriving supermarket gossip tabloids, star worship has been elevated to an art form in La Belle Province.

But never has a pop star penetrated the psyche of Quebeckers as deeply as Celine Dion. At barely 29, she is easily the most revered person in Quebec today, surpassing even Premier Lucien Bouchard, the hero of the 1995 referendum. According to a recent study by a Montreal marketing firm, fully 99.3 per cent of Quebeckers could identify Ms. Dion compared to 98.8 per cent who knew Mr. Bouchard. And in a recent Leger & Leger poll, only 68.5 per cent of Quebeckers had a favourable opinion of the Premier, while 90 per cent had only good things to say about Ms. Dion.

Her deification in her home province speaks volumes about the social and political significance of pop culture. For political scientist Christian Dufour, Ms. Dion is an icon the likes of which has not been known in Quebec since the hockey heyday of Maurice "The Rocket" Richard in the 1950s.

"Her successes are the successes of all Quebecois, much as the Rocket's goals were consolation for the humiliations experienced by French Canadians in the past," observes Mr. Dufour, a professor at l'Ecole nationale d'administration publique in Montreal, in an essay written shortly after Ms. Dion opened the Molson Centre last year. The event was rife with symbolism: Almost everyone agreed that the heir to the Rocket's aura was a natural choice to inaugurate the city's new hockey temple.

Celine Dion is the first star of planetary proportions ever to emerge from Quebec. She has sold close to 55 million albums. Since the release of Falling Into You in March last year, more than 22 million copies of the recording have found their way into CD and cassette players around the globe. The album clinched her status as the world's best-selling recording artist in 1996 and catapulted the "Diva of Pop" onto the cover of Time's international edition. At 6.5 million copies, 1995's D'eux (the title is a play on the French words for "two" and "of them," marking her first professional collaboration with Paris producer Jean-Jacques Goldman) is the best-selling French-language recording of all time. In her native language she tackles more inspired arrangements and compelling themes than she does in English, such as love in the age of AIDS (L'amour existe encore) and a girl's unrequited love for a gay man (Ziggy). The French now compare her to Edith Piaf, the character she is expected to play when she launches (oh yes) her Hollywood career.

To an outsider, it may seem paradoxical that Ms. Dion could be held in such high esteem by Quebeckers, a population that goes to tortuous lengths to assert its distinct political and cultural identity. Here is a woman who, en route to international success, has dropped the accent from her name on English promotional material at the insistence of her record company, and reduced herself to belting out insipid, formulaic pop tunes in English that smother the nuances of her ethereal voice. But it is precisely because she has been able to do this and remain fully loyal to her unpretentious Quebec roots and juggle a separate French singing career that she has become such a powerful symbol for Quebeckers.

She has succeeded in reconciling the three competing forces with which her francophone compatriots have struggled since the Conquest. "Descended from a French culture, surrounded by an Anglo-Saxon one and living like Americans -- these are the elements that sum Quebeckers up," notes pollster Jean-Marc Leger. "Celine Dion is the perfect embodiment of the happy balance [of these forces] to which Quebeckers aspire."

As Mr. Dufour sees it, she "has realized the harmonious synthesis -- still elusive on the political front -- between the old French Canada, closed and Catholic, and modern Quebec, open to the world."

Quebeckers watched in awe last month as these two worlds met -- without colliding -- on U.S. television when Ms. Dion, her unilingual parents and 13 siblings fielded questions about their roots on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

One need only pick up a local newspaper to appreciate the extent to which Quebeckers have appropriated each of her successes as their very own. The French-language media refer possessively to the chanteuse as "notre Celine nationale"("our national Celine"). WHEN her plane landed at Montreal's Mirabel airport after a triumphant European concert tour last year, Radio-Canada's all-news channel, le Reseau de l'information, broadcast the event live. Two years earlier, the main network interrupted its regular schedule to broadcast her wedding at Montreal's gothic Notre-Dame Basilica.

Can anyone imagine Newsworld doing the same for Bryan Adams? Moreover, would English Canadians care enough to watch?

Quebeckers did. And Montreal publisher Trustar made a small fortune by selling 1.3 million copies of a souvenir wedding album that hit the newsstands only a couple of days after the nuptials. When she arrived home earlier this month for four sold-out shows at Montreal's Molson Centre, the media paparazzi wanted to know -- before anything else -- whether she was pregnant. Headlines in the following day's newspapers announced the long-waited response: " Celine n'est pas enceinte"("Celine is not pregnant"). The sense of collective disappointment was palpable.

It prompted Le Journal de Montreal to ask its readers, in a telephone poll, whether or not she should take a break from her magnificent career to have a baby. Eighty-two per cent of them said yes. This abiding interest in her personal life, Mr. Leger opines, demonstrates how strongly Quebeckers consider her to be "one of the family."

This was not always the case.

All Quebeckers remember the homely adolescent who, only a few years ago, was the subject of cruel jokes and scathing ridicule in her native province. As the youngest of 14 children born to high-school dropouts

Therese and Adhemar Dion in tiny Charlemagne, Ms. Dion represented a parochial past that Quebeckers had long ago rejected.

"For a long time, intellectual Quebeckers of the Quiet Revolution were ashamed of this past," notes Mr. Dufour. And Ms. Dion, with her double-digit, Roman Catholic family, suffered the brunt of their shame and rejection.

Her kitschy hymns to John Paul II, during his 1984 Canadian papal visit, prompted sneers in post-Quiet Revolution cultural circles and were parodied for years by Quebec humorists. Quebec's leading humour magazine of the 1980s, Croc, took to calling the gangly adolescent "Canine Dion." In her public appearances, with "Maman" Dion hovering over her, she gushed about wanting to be the "biggest star in the world." Quebeckers snickered.

"She wasn't simply perceived as ketaine [tacky, hickish]," Mr. Leger says.

"She was ketaine."

As she attained sexual maturity, vicious innuendo circulated about her relationship with her manager, Rene Angelil, who is 26 years her senior.

The attacks sent her close to the breaking point. In a 1992 television interview with talk-show host Lise Payette, Ms. Dion wept profusely about the treatment she had endured from much of the Quebec public. The now legendary interview was also a turning point from which she has never looked back. The following year she released Colour of My Love,the breakthrough album that made her an international superstar, with sales of 15 million copies.

Since then, ne'er a disparaging word is heard in Quebec about "la petite fille de Charlemagne"-- another of the nicknames that has followed her since childhood. Attacking her has become something of a taboo.

"She has earned the respect of her detractors," says author and journalist Georges-Hebert Germain, who is preparing a biography of the singer. "For years, the cultural elite tried to diminish the importance of her success. That is simply no longer possible."

In fact, one must look outside Quebec to find any press on her that does not border on the obsequious. It was the Paris-based gossip rags that first dared to print that the waif-like Ms. Dion was suffering from anorexia nervosa. The rumour gained little currency in Quebec, where even the gossip mags paint her as a secular Mother Teresa.

Her relationship with her husband Mr. Angelil, the impresario who has masterfully executed her transformation from the hokey character out of Hymn Sing into a sexy, sultry star, also appears to be off limits in the Quebec media. This is not the case in France.

"Did Celine Dion marry her father?" the French magazine Psychologies asked last fall. "It is dangerous to try to analyze the dynamic that exists between two people one does not know intimately. But marrying the man who 'made' you is, symbolically, not unrelated to the presence of deep-rooted Oedipal fantasies. It is also a way to become the wife-daughter of a man one has put on a pedestal."

Wittingly or not, Ms. Dion cultivates this "little girl" persona. It is there on the Falling into You album cover, as she tugs mischievously on her T-shirt to expose her navel. It was there when, in a video broadcast at last year's Felix awards in Quebec, she addressed her fans with a large, stuffed toy in the background.

For Psychologies, Ms. Dion's marriage to Mr. Angelil -- who has managed her since she was 13 -- is like "a security blanket that bears witness to the difficulty some women experience in attaining adult female maturity, in displacing their mother from her position as the ideal woman."

Almost everyone in Quebec has heard the story of how Therese Dion, pregnant with her seventh child in 1954, climbed daily up the ladder with a hammer to help build her rapidly growing family's home in a hamlet east of Montreal.

"Never once did my mother let her pregnancies get in the way of her responsibilities or the needs of her family," Ms. Dion boasted in an interview last year. In short, Maman Dion has been a tough act to follow for Ms. Dion and her eight sisters.

Quebec author Gabrielle Roy provides a portrait of the archetypal French-Canadian family in The Tin Flute, her 1945 novel of poverty and despair in Montreal's Saint-Henri neighbourhood. "La mere sacrifiee" (the mother-martyr) stands out as a predominant figure in the novel. Rose-Anna Lacasse, who gives birth to her umpteenth child on her daughter's wedding day, teaches us all a lesson in self-sacrifice. She has not a minute to herself, what with her futile, endless search for an affordable apartment to shelter her burgeoning clan and what with husband Azarius's chronic unreliability and unemployment. But Rose-Anna runs a tight ship. She is a veritable rock, holding her family together through adversity and suffering. It is impossible to think of Maman Dion, who at 70 has acquired an enormous public profile of her own in Quebec, without also thinking of Rose-Anna. Except that her story is The Tin Flute with a happy ending.

"Mr. Dion doesn't have the same drive as Maman Dion. He doesn't have the same openness to the world," notes Mr. Germain, Ms. Dion's biographer. "It's always been the mother who has pushed the kids."

Always the referee, it was Maman who, in 1992, intervened when her youngest daughter created a stir at home by launching an emotional plea for national unity at the World's Fair in Seville, Spain. "When there's 14 of you around the table, you can have 14 different opinions. Not talking about politics is the best way to avoid fights."

This was the same Ms. Dion who, in 1990, refused to accept the Felix award (Quebec's Juno) for best anglophone singer of the year. "The public knows I'm still Quebecoise and francophone, even when I sing in English."

For Christian Dufour, these two events illustrate the extent to which she embodies the "classic ambivalence" of most Quebeckers -- fiercely proud and defensive of their francophone heritage yet fundamentally attached to their Canadian identity. Most Quebeckers identify instinctively with the internal turmoil that generated both of her declarations. It is the turmoil that has torn families apart in Quebec during two referendum campaigns and countless elections. Is it any wonder that Celine Dion has become such a powerful symbol in Quebec today?

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