Two Music Icons, Two Very Different Fates: Whitney Houston and Celine Dion

KBS2's Celeb Soldier's Secret will take a closer look at two of the biggest pop divas of their era, Whitney Houston and Celine Dion. The episode airs Tuesday, July 21 at 8:30 p.m. KST. Singer Soyou and music critic Bae Soon-tak join the show to break down why both women became defining voices of their generation, and how their lives ended up moving in opposite directions.

The night before the 2012 Grammy Awards, Whitney Houston was found dead in a hotel bathtub. Her body showed bruises in several places. Six hours after she was found, the water in the tub was reportedly still warm. The episode revisits her final hours using the autopsy findings and the details from the scene, and asks what really happened that night.

The show also traces how her personal life shaped her career. Houston married Bobby Brown, and four months later hit the peak of her career with the success of the film The Bodyguard. But Brown's cheating and violence continued through their 14-year marriage, and Houston kept trying to hold the family together. Her own family did not offer much support either. Her father sued her for $100 million. Over time, Houston appeared in public looking much thinner, and it later came out that she had been leaning on drugs whenever life got hard. Soyou, who attended one of Houston's concerts in Korea in person, said, "It was so painful that I could barely watch it to the end."

Celine Dion's story unfolded very differently. Early in her career, her older brother sent an audition tape to a well-known Canadian artist manager to help push his talented younger sister. When there was no reply, he called the office himself and warned, "You're going to regret it if you let my sister slip away." The manager, René Angélil, was close to bankruptcy at the time. After hearing Dion sing, he took out a loan against his own house to produce her debut album.

Dion later fell in love with Angélil, the manager who had quietly stood by her. He was 26 years older than her. Soyou said falling in love with your manager was hard to imagine, and admitted she was stunned by the age gap. Years later, when Angélil was diagnosed with throat cancer, Dion canceled her performance schedule to care for him full-time.

Then illness came for Dion herself. At the height of her career, she was diagnosed with stiff person syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease that stiffens muscles throughout the body. Loud sounds or sudden stimulation can cause her whole body to lock up and collapse. Even so, she refused to step away, saying, "If I can't run, I'll walk. If I can't walk, I'll crawl onto the stage." After long rehabilitation, she performed on top of the Eiffel Tower at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, delivering one of the most emotional moments of the games.

How Dion made it back to that stage, and what really happened on Houston's last night, will be shown on KBS2's Celeb Soldier's Secret on Tuesday, July 21 at 8:30 p.m. KST.