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Annette Dionne, the last surviving Dionne quintuplet and a champion of children’s rights, has died.
The Dionne Quints Home Museum in North Bay, Ont., says in a social media post that Annette died on Christmas Eve but did not provide further details.
She was 91.
“She believed it was important to maintain the Dionne Quints Museum and the history it provides for the future of all children,” the museum said in the post on Friday.
“Annette was the only surviving Quints and was the last surviving sibling amongst the 14 children of the Dionne family…Rest in Peace, Annette.”
Annette, Cecile, Yvonne, Marie and Émilie Dionne were born May 28, 1934
The Dionne quintuplets — made up of Annette, Emilie, Yvonne, Cecile and Marie — became a global sensation after their birth on May 28, 1934, as they were the first quintuplets known to survive past infancy.
But the attention came at a personal cost.
When the quintuplets were just months old during the Depression era, the Ontario government took them away from their parents, who already had five children, and placed them under the control of a board of guardians.
More importantly, the government put them in a nursery-style exhibition that millions of tourists lined up to observe through one-way glass.
The exhibition was called “Quintland” and was Canada’s biggest tourist attraction at the time.
They brought in about $500 million for the province.
Hollywood made movies about the girls, and companies such as Kellogg’s and Palmolive came knocking at their doors to make them their ambassadors.
Five identical ships were also named after the sisters during the Second World War.
Over the course of the first nine years of their lives that they remained on display, their mother, Oliva Dionne, tried to regain custody from the government but was unsuccessful.
When the quintuplets were 18-year-olds, they decided to move to Montreal and out of the public eye.
Emilie first died in August 1954.
Marie died in 1970.
Decades later, Cecile, who died earlier this year, came forward asking for compensation from the Ontario government.
In 1998, the Ontario government apologized to the sisters and issued a $4-million settlement for the years they spent on display.
Three years later, Yvonne died of cancer.
Dionne told The Canadian Press in a 2019 interview that parents should view childhood as a precious time which shouldn’t be exploited for profit.
The Dionne Quints Home Museum is the Dionne quintuplets’ original family home and was moved from its original site to North Bay, where the family legacy lives on.
