Shania Twain says she ‘wasn’t allowed to grieve’ after parents’ car crash death

By Pierra Willix, Press Association Senior Entertainment Reporter

Shania Twain has said she “wasn’t allowed to grieve” after her parents were killed in a car crash.

The Canadian singer was 22 when her mother, Sharon and stepfather Jerry, who had adopted Twain when she was four, died in a head-on collision with a lorry in 1987.

At the time, Twain had been living in Toronto and studying computer programming when she got a call from her sister.

“I collapsed hearing that news over the phone,” she told Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs.

“My sister called me and I could hear my little brother howling in the background.”

Following her parents’ death, Twain took on the role of caring for her three younger siblings.

“The kids could not be separated after that accident – they had to stay together,” she added.

Soon after, Twain became responsible for the family and her parents’ business affairs.

“I leave Toronto of course and am back in the last family home we had that the kids were still living in and moved back in,” she said.

“My older sister was gone and was married with two children and had her own life in another town. I had to do a lot of things I knew nothing about like take out a second mortgage for the house to sustain what is going to happen next.”

Twain said she then had to organise selling equipment from her parents’ business and was in lawyers’ offices frequently, navigating insurance affairs as passengers in the vehicle and the lorry driver were suing.

“There were so many complexities to the accident itself. I wasn’t allowed to grieve because I was thrown into this state of guardianship and executor, plus I don’t have a job,” she continued.

After finding a job at a golf resort in a town six hours from their hometown, Twain later moved there with her siblings as it offered them a steady income and allowed her sing.

Speaking on the radio show, Twain also details her parents’ abusive marriage – sharing that she felt she had to “protect” her mother.

“It was bad. He would choke her a lot and do things that don’t end well,” she said.

Twain would eventually meet and marry record producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange.

They were married in 1993 and had son Eja in 2001, however separated seven years later after he had an affair with her best friend, Marie-Anne Thiebaud.

It was her husband, Frederic Thiebaud, who Twain said alerted her to the affair.

“I didn’t know anything that was going on, but he then took the blinders off and told me. I didn’t believe him and told him he was imagining things,” she said.

Twain then recalled how they both decided to “let their (marriages go)”.

She added: “And in that time we found each other. I found out what a beautiful person he was.”

She then said that she would “treat him better”.

Twain and Thiebaud then married in 2011.

The five-time Grammy-winning Twain has had nine UK top 10 singles including You’re Still The One, From This Moment On and Don’t Be Stupid.

She has also had three number one albums including 1998’s Come On Over, 2017’s Now, and 2023’s Queen Of Me.

The full Desert Island Discs episode can be listened to on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 from Sunday at 10am.