At their peak they were more famous, loved and admired than any children before or since. The tiny babies from the backwoods of Northern Ontario, Canada, the first-ever surviving quintuplets, became the most written and talked about girls on earth.

Their miraculous birth, valiant fight for life, and seemingly ideal upbringing gave hope to a world deep in the despair of the Great Depression. Time and Life put them on their covers, Hollywood made movies about them, and company executives scrambled madly to sign them to endorsement contracts, contributing to an unprecedented infant industry worth $500 to the province of Ontario.

Their faces were everywhere - on magazines and newspapers, newsreels, ads, billboards, products, calendars - and still, the public could not get enough. Millions of people traveled across the continent just to see them, turning "Quintland" into one of the top tourist attractions in North America.

Treated like royalty and universally loved, the quints were considered the luckiest girls alive, but it was revealed to be only a facade. For eight years, their parents fought for the custody of the five girls who were taken away from them at birth, locked in a specially built hospital, made wards of the Government, and placed under a board of guardians headed by the obsessive Dr. Allan Dafoe and controlled by Ontario's ambitious premier, Mitchel Hepburn.

When the battle became public, the rest of the world cruelly saw the Dionne parents as ungrateful nuisances; the Dionnes saw only their family being destroyed by outsiders. The family's eventual victory proved hollow - after eight years, the damage was too great, the scars deep, and the tragedy irreversible.

See photos of celebrities before they hit the big-time.

The Dionne Quintuplets

Actress

Soundtrack

Self