Love gets her every time! Shania Twain and Frederic Thiébaud turned heartbreak into an iconic love story.
When the twosome met in the 90s, Twain was married to Robert “Mutt” Lange, with whom she shares son Eja (born in 2001), and Frederic was married to Marie-Anne Thiébaud, with whom he shares daughter Johanna. Twain, Lange, Marie-Ann and Frederic often spent time together in group settings.
“I did not get close to Fred at all, we didn’t have each other’s numbers,” Twain later explained during an appearance on the “Armchair Expert” podcast of the dynamic between the two couples in the 1990s and early 2000s. “He was not really part of our daily lives because he’s working these crazy hours. A lot of travel [for his] very high-profile company, just suit and tie and so he would be around, like, weekend dinners and stuff like that — we would all eat together and that was it. And then it would be mostly him and Mutt chatting, so I didn’t really know Fred very well.”
In 2008, the group was rocked when news broke that Marie-Anne and Lange had an affair.
“For the first week after finding out about the affair, I was ready to die,” she wrote in her 2011 memoir, From This Moment On. “To go to bed forever and never wake up. Or to hurt someone. I was ready to do something desperate. But in reality, there was nothing to do but to suffer through it.”
Both duos filed for divorce amid the scandal and while fans may not be surprised to learn Marie-Anne and Lange continued their romance, it was a plot twist when Twain fell in love with Frederic.
“We slowly became very, very good friends,” Twain said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in May 2011 after the twosome had wed. “We had many months of just trying to make sense of everything, holding each other up. It was a very difficult time emotionally for both of us. I would say he was probably stronger than I was. He was a tremendous support — we were a support to each other — and really found something beautiful in the end and unexpected.”
More than a decade later, Twain reflected on the controversy.
“Fred’s so smart. This is one of the smartest people I know [and] he didn’t know either. That helped me feel better. … Neither of us saw it coming. … I allowed myself to trust too much. … I did let my guard down too much,” the Grammy winner told Dax Shepard in February 2023. “I was angry, though. The anger comes a lot from my childhood too because I’m thinking, ‘Man, you can do anything to me, but if you f—king lie, like, right to my f—king face? Now, I’m so angry.’ It wasn’t just, ‘Infidelity happens.’ That was not me. I spun around in that for quite a while. That was the hardest part to let go of really, the anger.”
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