Annette Dionne, Last of the Celebrated Quintuplets, Dies at 91

She was the first to crawl, the first to cut a tooth, the first to recognize her name, and the last to die. And, like her sisters, she resented being exploited as part of a global sensation.

Annette Dionne, who shared in her siblings’ fame as one of the first quintuplets known to survive infancy but who distinguished herself as the sturdiest, the most musical and generally the first in line when the girls, captured in Depression-era newsreels, were paraded here and there in identical bonnets and dresses, died on Wednesday in Beloeil, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal. She was 91 and the last surviving sister.

Carlo Tarini, a family spokesman, announced the death, in a hospital, on Friday, saying the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

Of the Dionne quintuplets, indistinguishable in many ways, Annette was the first to crawl, the first to cut a tooth and the first to recognize her name, according to Life magazine, which chronicled the unparalleled celebrity of five babies born in an Ontario farmhouse before dawn on May 28, 1934.

The saga of the Dionne quintuplets began as a flash of happy news in the dreary depths of the Depression. At a combined weight of 13 pounds, 6 ounces, they survived — in a farmhouse lit by kerosene, without much in the way of plumbing — on water and corn syrup until breast milk was donated.

But there was money to be made in the publicity maelstrom. Among the beneficiaries, all with sketchy motives, was the Dionnes’ hometown, North Bay, Ontario, where the girls’ birthplace became a huge tourist attraction, bigger than Niagara Falls, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and spawning new hotels and highways.

And then there was Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe, the country doctor who arrived at the farmhouse after midwives had delivered the first two babies. He became the ringmaster of the media circus, who wound up feted across America and died a rich man.

Even the bewildered parents, who lost custody of the quints to the government lest they be exploited, wound up selling overpriced binoculars and hot dogs at Quintland, a lavish compound where the girls were kept from their parents and cared for by Dr. Dafoe and hired staff.

Those were the years when the girls, Emelie, Marie, Yvonne, Cécile and Annette, éwere visited by Clark Gable, Mae West and Bette Davis; christened warships; and met King George VI of England and his wife, the Queen of England. Their likenesses sold Colgate toothpaste, Lysol disinfectant and Quaker Oats.

“The public, almost literally, suffocated them with love,” wrote the historian Pierre Berton, the author of “The Dionne Years: A Thirties Melodrama” (1977).

Those were also the years when the five — identically dressed, lined up in a neat row and invariably unsmiling — were displayed several times a day on a balcony at Quintland, where 6,000 gawkers peered at them through one-way glass.

“It’s tiring, always being watched,” Annette said in middle age. “It was exploitation. We were not animals.”

The circumstances of the Dionnes’ early years were unique to their time, Mr. Berton wrote. A generation earlier, he observed, they would have “expired quickly,” and a generation later, the “spotlight would have been softer and the melodrama muted.” But the quintuplets were “a few minutes of escape from the grim reality” of the 1930s, he wrote, “sometimes the only good news on the front page.”

Oliva and Elzire Dionne, who had five older children and three younger ones, regained custody of the quintuplets in 1943, the year Dr. Dafoe died. The quints were 9 at the time and had rarely seen their parents or other siblings, despite living across the road. While their first nine years may have been freakish, the five children considered Quintland “paradise,” Annette said.

The reunion with their family, in a large brick house provided by the government but paid for from the quints’ earnings, was disruptive, several of them said. Both their older and younger siblings — 13 in all once the family was back together — were with family members they had always known. But the quints were unmoored, surrounded by strangers and subject to new routines. Later, three would contend that their father had sexually abused them during early adolescence.

All five left Ontario when they turned 18, settling in Montreal. Emelie was in a convent, where she died in 1954 at 20, after a seizure. Several of her sisters flirted on and off with a cloistered life. Marie, who died in 1970 at 36, was hospitalized with depression, and her children were placed in foster care. Cécile and Yvonne, who later became a librarian, attended nursing school, but it is unclear if either one finished or worked as a nurse.

Annette and Cécile married, had children, divorced and resumed using their maiden names. Annette briefly owned a flower shop and was an amateur pianist. Cécile died in July in Montreal.

All of them had small trust funds, but only Annette seems to have managed hers wisely, without financial worries, and she often shared her apartment with one or another of her sisters. Late in life, Annette, Cécile and Yvonne sued the province of Ontario for compensation for their hijacked lives, and a settlement equivalent to $2.8 million in American dollars (equal to about $5.6. million today) was reached in 1998. One of Cécile’s sons absconded with her share while helping his mother move from an apartment to more supported senior living, and was said to have disappeared.

From the time the Dionne quintuplets left home for Montreal, according to published reports, there were no exchanges of cards or letters with the rest of their family and only a few visits back to North Bay. Annette returned in 2018, after a 20-year absence, for a ceremony celebrating the quintuplets’ birth as a National Historic Event.

By then, the house in which the five were born had become the focus of a preservation effort. It had been a sparsely attended museum until 2015, when the government shut it down because of the overhead. Then the house was moved, in 2017, to a more propitious location, on the North Bay waterfront at Lake Nipissing, and reopened as a museum.

The Dionne Quints Heritage Board led the effort to reopen the site in the hopes of another economic boost, said Ed Valenti, the board chairman and a local real estate agent.

Annette made the trip although it entailed a 1,100-mile round-trip journey from Montreal to North Bay, accompanied by volunteer caretakers in the 90-degree August heat. She visited the house and her parents’ graves. Cécile was too infirm to join her.

Annette had been interviewed by The New York Times in 2017, when plans to move the Dionne house to a new site were still afoot. She said the reopening of her birthplace would be a cautionary tale.

“I think the museum staying in North Bay will help them from making foolish choices, like what they did to us, you know,” she said. “It should never be repeated again.”

Jane Gross, a former reporter for The New York Times, died in 2022. Ian Austen and Ash Wu contributed reporting.

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