Winter Olympics Memorable Moments: Sonja Henie More Memorable Moments Norwegian Sonja Henie won her first gold medal at the 1928 Olympics and at the next three Olympics no female figure skater could compete with her. Her routine and style set the new standard for the sport. . At 15 years, 10 months, Henie was the youngest woman ever to win a gold medal. She held that title for 70 years, until American figure skater Tara Lipinski , two months younger than Henie, won gold at the 1998 Nagano Games . After the 1928 Games Henie went on to successfully defend her gold medal at the 1932 Winter Games and the 1936 Winter Games . Ambitious as ever, Henie aimed to take her skating career in a new direction—Hollywood. She said she wanted to do what Fred Astaire was doing in the movies, only on skates. She turned professional after the 1936 Games and by the end of the year saw the release of her first movie, One in a Million. That film was the first of a dozen films Henie would star in over the next two decades.

She also began to gain fame by starring in a wildly popular traveling ice-skating show. Her Hollywood Ice Review was a spectacle of costumes, music, and skating that toured the world until the early 1950s. She died of complications from leukemia in 1969. Today, more than three-quarters of a century after her Olympic debut, Henie's accomplishments have retained their luster. No woman figure skater since has won three straight gold medals , and only one ( Katarina Witt in 1984 and 1988) has ever successfully defended her title. Sonja Henie Bio, Stats, and Results | Olympics at Sports-Reference.com Related Olympians: Cousin of Marit Henie . Medals: 3 Gold (3 Total) Biography Sonja Henie was the first superstar of women’s figure skating, winning three Olympic gold medals in 1928, 1932, and 1936. She made her Olympic début in 1924 when only an 11-year-old. She finished last in a field of eight but improved to fifth a few weeks later at the 1924 World Championship.

Henie finished second at the 1926 World Championships to Austria's [Herma Plank-Szabo], but she then won the championship for the next ten years consecutively. She did more to popularize figure skating than any other individual. Henie turned professional in 1936 and soon amassed a fortune. Her flair for showmanship ensured the success of the ten feature films she made in Hollywood and accelerated the public awareness of ice skating as a sport. She toured the world with spectacular ice reviews achieving great popularity, particularly in the USA. She was initially idolized in her native Norway, but had some image problems after World War II when she was perceived to be a Nazi sympathizer who failed to support war relief efforts in Norway. Henie married three times, all to very wealthy men, and her own earnings from ice shows made her one of the richest athletes ever. She later suffered from leukemia and died during a flight from Paris to Oslo where she was flying to visit a specialist. Results Winter Olympics Memorable Moments: Sonja Henie More Memorable Moments Norwegian Sonja Henie won her first gold medal at the 1928 Olympics and at the next three Olympics no female figure skater could compete with her.

Her routine and style set the new standard for the sport. . At 15 years, 10 months, Henie was the youngest woman ever to win a gold medal. She held that title for 70 years, until American figure skater Tara Lipinski , two months younger than Henie, won gold at the 1998 Nagano Games . After the 1928 Games Henie went on to successfully defend her gold medal at the 1932 Winter Games and the 1936 Winter Games . Ambitious as ever, Henie aimed to take her skating career in a new direction—Hollywood. She said she wanted to do what Fred Astaire was doing in the movies, only on skates. She turned professional after the 1936 Games and by the end of the year saw the release of her first movie, One in a Million. That film was the first of a dozen films Henie would star in over the next two decades. She also began to gain fame by starring in a wildly popular traveling ice-skating show. Her Hollywood Ice Review was a spectacle of costumes, music, and skating that toured the world until the early 1950s.

She died of complications from leukemia in 1969. Today, more than three-quarters of a century after her Olympic debut, Henie's accomplishments have retained their luster. No woman figure skater since has won three straight gold medals , and only one ( Katarina Witt in 1984 and 1988) has ever successfully defended her title. More about the 2010 Winter Olympics Did you know? Sonja Henie | Olympics Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia Edit Sonja Henie was born in Kristiania (part of modern Oslo), the only daughter of Wilhelm Henie (1872–1937), a prosperous Norwegian furrier and his wife Selma Lochmann-Nielsen (1888–1961). In addition to the income from the fur business, both of Henie's parents had inherited wealth. Wilhelm Henie had been a one-time World Cycling Champion and the Henie children were encouraged to take up a variety of sports at a young age. Henie initially showed talent at skiing , and then followed her older brother Leif to take up figure skating .

As a girl, Henie was also a nationally ranked tennis player and a skilled swimmer and equestrienne . Once Henie began serious training as a figure skater, her formal schooling ended. She was educated by tutors, and her father hired the best experts in the world, including the famous Russian ballerina Tamara Karsavina, to transform his daughter into a sporting celebrity. [2] Competitive career Edit Henie won her first major competition, the senior Norwegian championships, at the age of 10. She then placed eighth in a field of eight at the 1924 Winter Olympics , at the age of eleven. During the 1924 program, she skated over to the side of the rink several times to ask her coach for directions. But by the next Olympiad, she needed no such assistance. Henie won the first of an unprecedented ten consecutive World Figure Skating Championships in 1927 at the age of fourteen. The results of 1927 World Championships, where Henie won in 3–2 decision (or 7 vs.

8 ordinal points) over the defending Olympic and World Champion Herma Szabo of Austria , was controversial, as all three of five judges that gave Henie first-place ordinals were Norwegian (1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 2 = 7 points) while Szabo received first-place ordinals from an Austrian and a German Judge (1 + 1 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 8 points). Henie went on to win first of her three Olympic gold medals the following year. She defended her Olympic titles in 1932 and in 1936, and her World titles annually until 1936. She also won six consecutive European championships from 1931 to 1936. Henie's unprecedented three Olympic gold medals haven't been matched by any ladies single skater since; neither are her achievements as ten-time consecutive World Champion. While Irina Slutskaya of Russia won her seventh European Championship in 2006 to become the most successful ladies skater in European Championships, Henie retains record of most consecutive titles, sharing it with Katarina Witt of Eastern Germany / Germany (1983–1988).

Towards the end of her career, she began to be strongly challenged by younger skaters including Cecilia Colledge , Megan Taylor and Hedy Stenuf . However, she held off these competitors and went on to win her third Olympic title at the 1936 Winter Olympics , albeit in very controversial circumstances with Cecilia Colledge finishing a very close second. Indeed, after the school figures section at the 1936 Olympic competition, Colledge and Henie were virtually neck and neck with Colledge trailing by just a few points. As Sandra Stevenson recounted in her article in The Independent of the 21st April 2008, "the closeness [of the competition] infuriated Henie, who, when the result for that section was posted on a wall in the competitors' lounge, swiped the piece of paper and tore it into little pieces. The draw for the free skating [then] came under suspicion after Henie landed the plum position of skating last, while Colledge had to perform second of the 26 competitors. The early start was seen as a disadvantage, with the audience not yet whipped into a clapping frenzy and the judges known to become freer with their higher marks as the event proceeded.

Years later, a fairer, staggered draw was adopted to counteract this situation". During her competitive career, Henie traveled widely and worked with a variety of foreign coaches. At home in Oslo, she trained at Frogner Stadium, where her coaches included Hjordis Olsen and Oscar Holte. During the latter part of her competitive career she was coached primarily by the American Howard Nicholson in London. In addition to traveling to train and compete, she was much in demand as a performer at figure skating exhibitions in both Europe and North America. Henie became so popular with the public that police had to be called out for crowd control on her appearances in various disparate cities such as Prague and New York City. It was an open secret that, in spite of the strict amateurism requirements of the time, Wilhelm Henie demanded "expense money" for his daughter's skating appearances. Both of Henie's parents had given up their own pursuits in Norway—leaving Leif to run the fur business—in order to accompany Sonja on her travels and act as her managers. Henie is credited with being the first figure skater to adopt the short skirt costume in figure skating, wear white boots, and make use of dance choreography.

Her innovative skating techniques and glamorous demeanor transformed the sport permanently and confirmed its acceptance as a legitimate sport in the Winter Olympics. [3] Professional and film career Edit After the 1936 World Figure Skating Championships, Henie gave up her amateur status and took up a career as a professional performer in acting and live shows. While still a girl, Henie had decided that she wanted to move to Hollywood and become a movie star when her competitive days were over, without considering that her thick accent might hinder her acting ambitions. In 1936, following a successful ice show in Los Angeles orchestrated by her father to launch her film career, Hollywood studio chief Darryl Zanuck signed her to a long term contract at Twentieth Century Fox which made her one of the highest-paid actresses of the time. After the success of her first film, One in a Million, Henie's position was assured and she became increasingly demanding in her business dealings with Zanuck. Henie also insisted on having total control of the skating numbers in her films such as Second Fiddle (1939).

In addition to her film career at Fox, Henie formed a business arrangement with Arthur Wirtz, who produced her touring ice shows under the name of "Hollywood Ice Revue". Wirtz also acted as Henie's financial advisor. At the time, figure skating and ice shows were not yet an established form of entertainment in the United States. Henie's popularity as a film actress attracted many new fans and instituted skating shows as a popular new entertainment. Throughout the 1940s, Henie and Wirtz produced lavish musical ice skating extravaganzas at Rockefeller Center's Center Theatre attracting millions of ticket buyers. At the height of her fame, her shows and touring activities brought Henie as much as $2 million per year. She also had numerous lucrative endorsement contracts, and deals to market skates, clothing, jewelry, dolls, and other merchandise branded with her name. These activities made her one of the wealthiest women in the world in her time. Henie broke off her arrangement with Wirtz in 1950 and for the next three seasons produced her own tours under the name "Sonja Henie Ice Revue".

It was an ill-advised decision to set herself up in competition with Wirtz, whose shows now featured the new Olympic champion Barbara Ann Scott . Since Wirtz controlled the best arenas and dates, Henie was left playing smaller venues and markets already saturated by other touring ice shows such as Ice Capades. The collapse of a section of bleachers during a show in Baltimore, Maryland in 1952 compounded the tour's legal and financial woes. In 1953 Henie formed a new partnership with Morris Chalfen to appear in his European Holiday On Ice tour. This was a great success. She produced her own show at New York's Roxy Theatre in January 1956. [4] However, a subsequent South American tour in 1956 was a disaster. Henie was drinking heavily at that time and could no longer keep up with the demands of touring, and this marked her retirement from skating. In 1938, she published her autobiography Mitt livs eventyr which has translated and released as Wings on My Feet in 1940, which was republished in a revised edition in 1954.

At the time of her death, Henie was planning a comeback for a television special that would have aired in January 1970. [5] Nazi controversy Edit Henie's connections with Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Nazi officials made her the subject of controversy before, during, and after World War II. During her amateur skating career, she performed often in Germany and was a favorite of German audiences and of Hitler personally. As a wealthy celebrity, she moved in the same social circles as royalty and heads of state and made Hitler's acquaintance as a matter of course. Controversy appeared first when Henie greeted Hitler with a Nazi salute during an exhibition in Berlin some time prior to the 1936 Winter Olympics ; she was strongly denounced by the Norwegian press. She did not repeat the salute at the Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, but after the Games she accepted an invitation to lunch with Hitler at his resort home in nearby Berchtesgaden, where Hitler presented Henie with an autographed photo with a lengthy inscription. After beginning her film career, Henie kept up her Nazi connections, for example personally arranging with Joseph Goebbels for the release of her first film, One in a Million, in Germany.

During the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany, German troops saw Hitler's autographed photo prominently displayed at the piano in the Henie family home in Landøya, Asker. [6] As a result, none of Henie's properties in Norway were confiscated or damaged by the Germans. Henie became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1941. Like many Hollywood stars, she supported the U.S. war effort through USO and similar activities, but she was careful to avoid supporting the Norwegian resistance movement, or making public statements against the Nazis. For this, she was condemned by many Norwegians and Norwegian-Americans. After the war, Henie was mindful that many of her countrymen considered her to be a quisling. However, she made a triumphant return to Norway with the Holiday on Ice tour in 1953 and 1955. Personal life Edit Henie was married three times, to Dan Topping, Winthrop Gardiner Jr. [7] and the wealthy Norwegian shipping magnate and art patron, Niels Onstad.

After her retirement in 1956, Henie and Onstad settled in Oslo and accumulated a large collection of modern art that formed the basis for the Henie-Onstad Art Centre at Høvikodden in Bærum near Oslo. In addition to her marriages, Henie had a variety of love interests, including her skating partners Jack Dunn and Stewart Reburn, celebrated boxing legend Joe Louis, a much-publicized affair with Tyrone Power, and a later romance with actor Van Johnson. According to the biography Queen of Ice, Queen of Shadows, written by her brother Leif with Raymond Strait after her death, Henie was obsessed with money and sex, had a vile temper when crossed, and used her family and others shamelessly to advance her own ends. Henie was diagnosed with leukemia in the mid-1960s. She died of the disease at age 57 in 1969 during a flight from Paris to Oslo. [8] Considered by many as one of the greatest figure skaters in history, she is buried with Onstad in Oslo on the hilltop overlooking the Henie-Onstad Art Centre.

Results Sonja Henie biography recounts a glamorous, controversial life | Sports Biblio Sonja Henie biography recounts a glamorous, controversial life February 22, 2016 / Wendy Parker / 0 Comments Sonja Henie was a teenage sporting star and global celebrity long before the sport of figure skating produced more contemporary versions. The Norwegian-born Henie won Olympic gold in 1928, 1932 and 1936 before coming to the United States and embarking on a Hollywood film career. Along the way, she curried favor with Hitler, had several notorious affairs and gained a reputation as something of a mean-spirited person. The “Pavlova on Ice” image she carved for herself on skates didn’t carry over to her life away from the ice, according to a 1985 biography assisted by her embittered brother, actor Leif Henie. That book, written by celebrity biographer Raymond Strait, has been renamed and reissued for spring 2016 publication. The text of “Sonja Henie: An Unsuspected Life,” is largely unchanged.

The initial book, occasionally dubbed “Sonja Dearest,” received mixed reviews from critics, but was a revelation to skating fans caught up in the exploits of Katarina Witt, the sultry 1984 Olympic gold medalist at Sarajevo. The reissued biography follows a Sonja Henie reappraisal timed for the 2014 Sochi Olympics, including a warts-and-all profile in Vanity Fair. While Sonja Henie’s post-Olympics life was at times troubling, her influence on her sport was groundbreaking. She transformed figure skating into an art form, all the way down to her novel choice of white boots: Here was a huge visual shift—from masculine to feminine, from prose to poetry. Just as the ballerina’s pointe shoes were pink, suddenly the female ice skater’s boots were white, redolent of fairy and folk tales, of youthful purity and Nordic power. Sonja had single-handedly pulled figure skating into the realm of metaphor—and where there is metaphor, there can also be art.

In “The Pavlova of the Ice,” film footage shot in 1928 ( and available on YouTube ), she is skating outdoors, her slow-motion leaps and spins set against snow-dusted mountains that are nothing short of Wagnerian. One can see why chief among her legion of fans was Adolf Hitler. Before Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, Tara Lipinski, Debi Thomas and Kristi Yamaguchi traded their names for commercial endorsements and instant celebrity as American champions, Sonja Henie parlayed her athletic fame for the riches of skating tours in the U.S., as well as the big screen. “Little Miss Moneybags” was just one of the many unflattering nicknames Henie engendered before her death , from leukemia, in 1969. The energetic blonde appeal she enjoyed, and that landed her on the cover of Time magazine in 1939, quickly turned to something very different once the business of being Sonja Henie became established, according to the biography.

Leif Henie was also Sonja Henie’s business partner (he died in 1984, the year before the original biography was published) and had to deal with her tantrums, her many affairs (Tyrone Power, Joe Louis, Van Johnson) and her three marriages. The first of her 15 films, “One in a Million,” was released in 1936, just after Sonja Henie won her final Olympic gold medal, and introduced her to legions of new American fans who became the initial audience for her skating tours as well. Six of the nine films she made for Twentieth Century Fox between 1936 and 1943 were re-released on DVD in 2014 by Fox Cinema Archives, and provide an adequate survey of her screen work for an unfamiliar viewer. The Glittering Rise and Fall of Sonja Henie, Ice Skating’s Original Queen | Vanity Fair Twitter Left, world-champion figure skater Sonja Henie, circa 1938.

Right, Henie, the defending gold medalist, performing her skating routine at the 1936 Winter Olympics, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany., Left, from Photofest; right, from © Bettmann/Corbis. There are now three generations that have never heard of her. Say her name to anyone under 40, and they won’t know that she was the first teen phenom of modern times—that in 1928, months before Shirley Temple was even born, this dimpled imp of 15 was already a child star on the world’s stage. She was called “the Nasturtium of the North,” “the Ice Queen of Norway,” “the White Swan,” and, less flatteringly, “Little Miss Moneybags.” Her surname rhymes with “penny,” so perhaps it’s no surprise that she counted every last one. When she died, in 1969, her holdings were estimated at more than $47 million.

Indeed, the word that really fit this bundle of cutting-edge charisma would not be coined until the 1960s, when Andy Warhol packed star wattage and have-it-all hunger into three syllables: “superstar.” Sonja Henie was the first. What did she do? Sonja Henie was a figure skater. And while there were famous figure skaters before her—Jackson Haines, known as the “American skating prince,” and men such as Axel Paulsen and Ulrich Salchow, for whom jumps were named—none caught the attention of the public, no, the adoration, as Henie did. Beginning in 1927, at the age of 14, she won 10 world championships in a row. More amazing still, during those 10 years, she won three successive gold medals in the Winter Olympics of 1928, 1932, and 1936. Without missing a beat, Henie stepped off the gold-medal podium and into the Twentieth Century-Fox studio system, where she proved to be a monster at the box office, reportedly earning more than $500,000 within a year.

Simultaneous with her film career, Henie launched an ice extravaganza that would crisscross the country. Her sold-out ice shows worked as advertising for her movies. Or, perhaps it was the other way around: the movies brought the masses to the shows. Whichever way you look at it, the synergy, like Henie, was irresistible. She put figure skating on the map and got everyone heading for the ice. The second child of Wilhelm and Selma Henie was born in a snowstorm. “Winter had given way to spring,” Sonja wrote in a 1940 memoir, Wings on My Feet. “Then came the worst blizzard Oslo ever suffered—and me.” The date was April 8, 1912, and although the Henies had a handsome son, four-year-old Leif, the new daughter had a special lock on their hearts, especially Wilhelm’s. Whatever Sonja wanted, she eventually got—a family dynamic that would last a lifetime. The first thing she remembers wanting was to skate. The Henies were in a position to satisfy Sonja’s every desire.

Wilhelm, who came from old money generated by a brush factory and a fur company, was a smart businessman who grew the family fortune. He was also a world-class athlete who’d been a competitive speed skater, and won the track cycling world championship in 1894. Sonja inherited Wilhelm’s need for speed—“winter drunk” is how she described the sensation of sledding, skiing, and skating into icy winds. She also shared her father’s no-nonsense approach to getting what you want in life fast. Sonja’s mother, Selma, was not keen on sports or speed. A ship captain’s daughter with her own inheritance, she was as introverted as Wilhelm was extroverted. But the couple balanced each other. And both were happy to build home life around their tiny star, who remembers being on skis by age four, impressing everyone with her coordination and grace. By five she was studying ballet with a former teacher of the renowned Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova. Classical dance was Sonja’s first love by default, because the one thing her parents would not give her outright was ice skates; they thought she was too young.

Sonja spent her earliest years begging, yearning, for skates. Leif wrote that Sonja snitched a pair of his old clamp-on blades at age five and within months surprised everyone by winning a children’s skating competition. Sonja’s memory is that her parents gave her the clamp-ons at age six, that Leif taught her how to fall on the ice (“the way a length of rope drops”), and that she learned figures from a local skater, who then asked Wilhelm to enter her, aged seven, in that first competition. Whichever time line is correct, the essential truths are these: once on the ice, Sonja didn’t want to come off, and once having won, her winning became the family grail. Sonja’s new schedule included three hours’ practice in the morning, two in the afternoon, and a diet strictly monitored and rather pagan—all her life, Sonja would swear by raw eggs and rare steaks. Schooling was out and the best skating teachers were in: Oscar Holte, Martin Stixrud, and later, for a steep price, the full-time services of Howard Nicholson.

Because balletic line was a key facet in Sonja’s developing Jackson Haines-like skating style, she spent time in London studying classical dance with the Russian ballerina Tamara Karsavina. “I wanted more than anything else,” Sonja wrote, “to make my free-skating program a blend of dancing and figure skating.” “You have to have an image of yourself,” says Peggy Fleming, the 1968 Olympic gold medalist. “She had style and artistry and athleticism, but most important, I think, at the beginning and back in that era, she had guts. She had the guts to follow her thoughts—to follow the image that she had of herself.” The creation of Sonja’s “image” was a family project. In her first Olympics—1924, Chamonix, aged 11—she wore a baggy outfit, the black skate boots of the day, and finished last in a field of eight competitors. Three years later, in 1927, when she won her first world title, her uniquely choreographed free skate was delivered in a svelte costume of white velvet, its bell skirt hemmed to just above the knee. The audience was shocked . . . and delighted.

Sonja’s liberation from those old-crow skating skirts showed off spins and spirals to better advantage, and allowed her to perform tricks—the single axel, for instance—that had previously belonged to male skaters. And one more thing. As Michael Kirby, the Canadian champion who was Sonja’s skating partner in the late 1940s, would write, “She had what was thought to be incredible gall for wearing pure white skates. This, she told the press, was because it reminded her of the beautiful snow in her homeland of Norway.” Here was a huge visual shift—from masculine to feminine, from prose to poetry. Just as the ballerina’s pointe shoes were pink, suddenly the female ice skater’s boots were white, redolent of fairy and folk tales, of youthful purity and Nordic power. Sonja had single-handedly pulled figure skating into the realm of metaphor—and where there is metaphor, there can also be art. In “The Pavlova of the Ice,” film footage shot in 1928 ( and available on YouTube ), she is skating outdoors, her slow-motion leaps and spins set against snow-dusted mountains that are nothing short of Wagnerian.

One can see why chief among her legion of fans was Adolf Hitler. Sonja’s 10 years of domination date from her 1927 world title. When the Henies weren’t moving Sonja’s training from one winter wonderland to another, she was skating exhibitions in the great cities of the globe. This extensive exhibition skating was meant to give her poise under any pressure. And it did. She won gold in St. Moritz, 1928, gold in Lake Placid, 1932, and—despite Cecilia Colledge snapping at her heels—gold in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 1936. Sonja set an Olympic record that has been nearly impossible to match. Which is not to say there weren’t controversies during her years of competition. Skating in Berlin, ahead of the 1936 Winter Olympics, Sonja was told that Hitler and his entourage had been seated. She skated into the rink at full speed, did her sharp little skid stop in front of the Führer, raised her arm and declared, “Heil Hitler.” The crowd went mad.

The next day, her compatriots in Scandinavia were distraught, the newspapers asking, “Is Sonja a Nazi?” Her impulsive act was a stain on her white velvet. At the Olympics, a chastened Sonja did not salute, though word that she and her parents had lunched with Hitler at his retreat in the mountains didn’t help matters. According to her brother’s writings, Sonja’s response to the uproar was “I don’t even know what a Nazi is.” Henie shaking hands with Adolf Hitler, among her legion of fans, following her third Olympic victory at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Paternkirchen, Germany., From AP Images. “I don’t think Sonja Henie was a political person in any way, shape, or form,” says Dick Button, the winner of two Olympic gold medals in a row, 1948 and 1952. “She was an opportunist . . .

I don’t think she could have cared less who Hitler was, except for whatever power he had and what it would do for her career.” “I want to do with skates what Fred Astaire is doing with dancing,” Sonja told The New York Times on March 18, 1936, about a month after the closing ceremonies of the Olympics. Sonja’s amateur status—and when she might lose it—had been a hot topic for years, almost as if it were her virginity. Now the question was, what’s next? Sonja had observed that there were no skaters in Hollywood, which meant there was a vacuum to be filled. She decided she was the one to fill it—and not as a specialty act. “Sonja was visionary in that she saw what the audience for figure skating could be,” says Edward Z. Epstein, an author and playwright who worked with Universal Pictures for many years and was a competitive skater in his teens. “She refused to do a number in someone else’s movie.” For Sonja, the year 1936 was like winning the lottery. Having announced her retirement from competition, she received calls from producers and film studios.

The most important of these calls would be the one that came from Arthur Wirtz, a brilliant Chicago entrepreneur and real-estate mogul who was easily as enterprising as Sonja. The owner of the Chicago Blackhawks, the Chicago Bulls, and the Chicago Stadium, he saw Sonja as a way to fill stadiums around the country. He signed her to a touring contract and within weeks tested the waters by presenting “Sonja Henie Night” at Madison Square Garden—a smashing success. He asked her to put together her dream show to launch the following year. “The plan of that pioneer show,” Sonja wrote in her memoir, “was new in that I was to be the prima ballerina, so to speak, of a two-hour show, with a professional cast supporting me.” The one call Sonja hadn’t gotten was from her film studio of choice: Darryl F. Zanuck’s Twentieth Century-Fox. “The studios had their little niches,” Epstein explains. “Sonja fit into Fox. As she said, Zanuck had a reputation for looking for cutting-edge people.

He would take a chance on something that wasn’t conventional.” To get Zanuck’s attention, Sonja and her father, with the help of Wirtz, brought an ice show to Hollywood’s Polar Palace ice rink. With his usual chutzpah, Wilhelm went to see William Randolph Hearst. Leif would write that Wilhelm said he’d give $5,000 to the charity of Hearst’s choice if the actress Marion Davies, Hearst’s mistress, would sponsor Sonja’s shows. The deal was struck, and those two performances, in May of 1936, were glittering events attended by the biggest stars in town, including Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, and Myrna Loy. Zanuck did not attend the first show, but he was there for the second and soon summoned the Henies. He offered supporting-role status, and Sonja insisted she would accept nothing less than title roles. She didn’t give an inch, and Zanuck caved.

Sonja signed a five-year contract stipulating $125,000 per picture, one picture a year, its filming to be done during the summer so she could tour with her ice show in the winter. Her first picture, One in a Million, was a hit that premiered in December 1936 at New York’s Roxy Theatre, where Sonja arrived on the arm of the beauteous Fox actor Tyrone Power, thought to be the love of her life. Henie in her first Hollywood film, One in a Million, 1936., © 20th Century Fox/courtesy of Everett Collection. It was pretty savvy, Sonja’s focus on RKO’s Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers franchise as the model for what she might do in pictures. She saw that as a dimpled soubrette she’d have to do some form of musical comedy. She also knew that Hollywood wasn’t stocked with leading men who could skate. What Fox copied were RKO’s black-and-white Art Deco sets, the nimble pace, the stock characters, the silly plots, and the big production numbers that got more inventive—black ice, special effects, dream sequences—with every movie.

Sonja had innate musicality, which gave her skating numbers a feeling of well-being. She had a lovely, Astaire-like élan on the ice. And she had a signature move of pure joy: her Tinker Bell toe-tip runs, something no one else has done to such powerful effect. “It’s very unusual to run on toe picks,” says Aja Zanova Steindler, the world-champion figure skater who defected from Czechoslovakia in 1950, at the age of 18. “But she just up and took off like a bird.” Sonja may not have been a Ziegfeld beauty, and as an actress, well, she was one of the few female stars in Hollywood not tested for the role of Scarlett O’Hara. It didn’t matter. Smiling, spinning, she was giving the world exactly what it wanted. Her movies, so many of them nestled in frosty-paned Mitteleuropa mountain resorts, were an alternate universe made of powdered sugar—an antidote to Europe’s ominous rumbling toward war. “She kept Fox alive,” says Connie Wald, the widow of producer Jerry Wald.

“She was so big,” says Epstein, “at one point MGM produced a movie, with Joan Crawford for God’s sake, called Ice Follies of 1939. It was ridiculous. Joan couldn’t even walk on ice.” And just as movies like 1948’s The Red Shoes inspired a generation of girls to become ballerinas, so Sonja’s movies—along with her ice shows—launched a generation of figure skaters. “She was my idol,” says “Boots” Beyer, an adagio skater in the team Narena & Norris. “I saw Sonja’s first movie, One in a Million, and said to myself, That’s what I want to do. I never dreamed I’d end my career with her.” Into the first flush of her celluloid-and-ice-show stardom came the greatest loss of Sonja’s life, the death of her father in May 1937.

Michael Kirby remembers in his book, Figure Skating to Fancy Skating, Sonja once telling him of that first competition she won, at age seven, how her father “was not clapping or yelling, but he had the biggest smile I have ever seen.” Kirby believed that for the rest of her life, “She was yearning to be something special to one man, the way she had been for her father.” And yet, the death of Wilhelm worked a change in Sonja. “The Nasturtium of the North” became tough and acquisitive about money, according to her brother. “The Ice Queen of Norway” took over the show. At Fox, the production people deferred to her unerring judgment when shooting the skating numbers, while performing in her Hollywood Ice Revue, she rode herd over every aspect of production—music, costumes, chorus, box office, ancillary products (“Sonja Henie” sweaters, ski outfits, skates). She kept a cold eye on her cash, a critical eye on her ice show, and a perfectionist’s eye on her public persona—all of which required unflagging energy and attention to detail. It was a kind of control at odds with catching and keeping a man.

When it came to sex, “the White Swan” was reportedly aggressive, progressive—though only after Wilhelm died. Leif would later paint his sister as promiscuous, but as one male skater of the era says, she was “a lusty, healthy, happy woman.” In the skating world, it was common knowledge that Sonja’s skating partners often partnered her in bed. “I think she slept with them all,” says Susan Strong Davis, a former skater in Sonja’s show. “She was always in bed with somebody.” Milton Sperling, a screenwriter at Fox, put it succinctly: “She really loved to fuck.” Still, when Sonja did fall in love, she dropped like a length of rope. Those who knew her say that Tyrone Power was the one. Henie with actor and love-interest Tyrone Power in a scene from the film *Thin Ice,*1937., © 20th Century Fox/courtesy of Getty Images. Power, it turned out, was one of the few things Sonja wanted that she didn’t get: in 1939 he married the French actress Annabella.

Sonja went on to not one but two Social Register marriages: the first, in 1940, to Dan Topping, an heir to millions and part owner of the New York Yankees (his brother Bob was married to Lana Turner), and the second, in 1949, to Winthrop Gardiner Jr., who had inherited Gardiners Island. Neither man worked, both took advantage of Sonja’s generosity, according to her brother, and both marriages failed. Husbands aside, for “Little Miss Moneybags,” the 1940s were glitter and gold. Sonja wore Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry and Henie furs, traveled with masses of luggage, and stayed at the best hotels. At her gorgeous Holmby Hills house, at 243 Delfern Drive, and elsewhere around the city, she became famous for throwing the most extravagant parties in Hollywood, entering one of them on the back of a small elephant. And she built an elegant estate just outside of Oslo.

Sonja made a lot of money from her pictures (11 in all), but this was merely a fraction of the multi-millions she was making with the shows, which continued to pull in sold-out crowds long after her draw at the movies declined. Rolling annually into Madison Square Garden, “Sonja Henie’s Hollywood Ice Revue” rocked the house. “She had a way of doing several strokes,” says Don Watson, a young virtuoso she hired in 1952, who went on to an illustrious career in skating. “Then she’d flip her head up high, and with those large eyes and big smile, she acknowledged the balcony, their existence up there. And they loved her for it.” It was a well-oiled enterprise Sonja had going, and she couldn’t have asked for a better business partner than Arthur Wirtz. He was a man of his word who honored a handshake. He not only kept the bookings and travel running smoothly—on its own train, no less, the Sonja Henie Special—but also helped Sonja to invest in real estate, restaurants, even Black & White scotch, according to Dick Button.

He liked Sonja, admired her, and though he knew himself to be shrewd, he once said, “Sonja is shrewder.” But Sonja would part ways with Wirtz, prodded on by her second husband, Winnie Gardiner, who thought she should be getting a bigger percentage from Wirtz, even though she was already getting half. “I told her at the time it was an extraordinarily bad business decision,” says Tom King, who was then the publicity director for all Wirtz concerns, and who later married Barbara Ann Scott, the Olympic gold medalist in 1948. Perhaps Sonja was trying to find Wilhelm in Winnie, trying to locate a strong man in the lightweight she’d married. It’s also true she was peeved because Wirtz, according to King, “wanted to have backup people. He always wanted to improve the show. And she wasn’t going to take any second billing.” Sonja wouldn’t let other blonds in the show, never mind another star. She was refusing to recognize what those around her saw clearly: that while actresses can go on forever, athletes cannot.

Never a drinker, she started hitting the scotch which, according to her brother, accentuated the black-and-white sides of her personality. Sidney Smith, who directed Sonja’s live television specials in the 1950s and also her last movie, the documentary Hello, London, remembers something the Czech cinematographer Otto Heller had observed: “He said, ‘Don’t you see? She’s one side good, one side money.’” The fact is, Sonja could be extremely generous and often was, though quietly. She was very giving with Leif’s three sons, for a time, and with Michael Kirby’s children. And yet, Sonja risked further enmity from Norway when she chose not to donate funds to the Norwegian underground during World War II. She fought incessantly with Leif over real estate and family trusts. And over money, she ungratefully broke with Wirtz. The karmic backlash began. For the 1951–52 season, Sonja had to build a whole new show from scratch—the Sonja Henie Ice Revue.

“A lot of skaters wouldn’t skate with her, because she was the whole show,” recalls Boots Beyer, a headliner in the new show. “She did eight numbers. I mean, you’d have to have a constitution of iron to be so strong.” Furthermore, what Winnie hadn’t known when he sewed the seeds of discontent was that bookings were done two years in advance, and Wirtz’s revue, now starring Barbara Ann Scott, was already scheduled in all the stadiums Sonja had played through the years. It meant that Sonja’s new show had to go into second-rate spaces, with long jumps from stop to stop. Sonja never found a company manager who could handle the job the way Wirtz’s people had. And in March of 1952, when a section of bleachers collapsed on her opening night in Baltimore because the construction crew hired to build them was still working minutes before the show, it was the beginning of a downward spiral. No one was killed, and Sonja handled the disaster with aplomb, super-lawyer Jerry Geisler at her side, but the season was a financial disaster. Sonja had to borrow from, yes, Wirtz to meet her payroll.

“Arthur Wirtz gave me the check, and I gave it to Sonja,” says King. “That’s a fact.” Henie receiving the gold medal at the Winter Olympic Games at Lake Placid, New York, 1932., From AP Images. Things dwindled to the point where Sonja and a much-reduced company found themselves performing in New Brunswick, Canada, in a Quonset hut that held 600. “It was so cold,” says Don Watson, “she was doing her hula number with one of those Norwegian sweaters on.” Nonetheless, Sonja had one last hurrah ahead of her. Morris Chalfen, the owner of Holiday on Ice, had gotten word of the Quonset-hut gig. He, too, had always admired Sonja. He offered her a European tour—Paris, London, Berlin . . . and Oslo. Sonja didn’t want to go to Oslo. She feared the wrath of those who couldn’t forget her “Heil Hitler,” or who hadn’t forgiven her for not helping, with all her millions, to fund the Resistance. Chalfen told her he’d test the waters.

She swept through Europe during the summer of 1953, beautifully presented by Chalfen, and prepared to face her fears in Oslo—33 performances from August 21 to September 20. “I was there and every performance was sold out,” says Don Watson. “Oslo, only one announcement was made, and that was for the one person they knew. It was for Sonja. In her first entrance in the show, the boys, 24 in gold tails and top hats, they went down on one knee and made a sort of passageway. And she made her entrance, with the announcement ‘And now . . . Sonja.’ She came out with this huge train behind her, white ermine. Well, the audience gasped. It was like, My God, she’s here, she’s alive. Beautiful figure, costume, lighting. Some of the Norwegians had to come back twice. The majority of the audience stood. Seven thousand people standing.” In 1955, things went south in South America. The audiences didn’t understand ice shows or skating or Sonja. Now 43, she was deeply unhappy with her diminishing skill.

“It was over,” says Aja Zanova Steindler. “The hardest thing is to quit at the top. You want to stay—this is your life. A marvelous life. How do you leave? It’s a terrible thing. And Sonja was going through that. … She was very sad. And drinking.” Sonja retired in May 1956, and in June she married the Norwegian shipowner Niels Onstad, a childhood friend of the family whom she had secretly been seeing. Finally! A strong man with his own money. The couple traveled the world and socialized. A Sonja Henie party was still a big deal—sparkling with stars like Joan Crawford, Cyd Charisse, Cesar Romero, Cary Grant, Liberace. And Sonja still loved speed. When she had her hair done by a new svengali of the scissors named Jon Peters (later to be a major Hollywood producer), the two hit it off, and for fun, with her in the back, they’d go flying through the Santa Monica mountains on his motorcycle. Believing in Peters, she lent him $100,000 toward his first salon.

Sonja’s biggest project of the 60s was the one she shared with her husband. Together, she and Onstad built a superb collection of modern art—Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, Miró, Villon, Rouault. More than 100 paintings! After precise and careful planning, they built a modernist architectural gem in which to house the collection in Oslo. The Henie-Onstad Art Center opened with royal fanfare on August 23, 1968. A month later, Sonja got a cold she couldn’t shake. Onstad took her to several doctors, unwilling to accept the diagnosis—leukemia—which he decided to keep from her. Don Watson, a friend until her death, says Sonja was told it was anemia, and she was treated with blood transfusions. (Jon Peters thinks she knew the truth: “She knew every dime, she knew every jewel, she knew every wig, she knew every painting. If she had leukemia, she knew it.”) Except for big dips in energy, followed by transfusions, life went on as usual.

Sonja even began to prepare a skating show for television; she was rehearsing to “Lara’s Theme,” music from the film sensation Doctor Zhivago, Don Watson recalls. The couple spent the summer of 1969 in Europe, and in Paris, the night before their planned return to California, Sonja tired. She and Onstad flew instead to Oslo for a quick transfusion. On that flight, Sonja closed her eyes for a nap and never woke up. It was October 12, 1969, and she was 57. In 1985, about 16 years after Sonja’s death, a biography co-written by Raymond Strait and Leif Henie (who died in 1984) was published: Queen of Ice, Queen of Shadows: The Unsuspected Life of Sonja Henie. The book is richly detailed, brimming with background information, and loaded with fascinating insights from Sonja’s colleagues and friends. It is also merciless, sharing every last foible and flaw. More than one reviewer compared the book to the Joan Crawford takedown Mommie Dearest.

Obviously the sibling of a superstar is going to have grievances, but Sonja’s peers in the skating world, all that Vanity Fair spoke to, found the book “unfair.” Dick Button: “Siblings fall out. She was very good to everybody.” Boots Beyer: “I will never say anything bad about Sonja. She was wonderful to us. I know she was tough on some people—and probably for good reason.” Susan Strong Davis: “Oh my God, she was the original bitch. The chorus, we were just the peasants. But she was fantastic. And she knew it. I really can’t say enough about her, bitch that she was.” Jon Peters: “At the end of the day, Sonja Henie was this little girl in this big game—and people like to vilify others.” Don Watson: “She was happy rehearsing. She was happy performing. She loved fine restaurants. She enjoyed champagne, and she enjoyed parties . . . She’d walk into the arena, backstage, rehearsal—I mean, when Sonja arrived there was excitement. Something was going to happen.” And now . . . Sonja.

Sonja Henie - Biography - IMDb Sonja Henie Biography Showing all 28 items Jump to: Overview (4) | Mini Bio (2) | Spouse (3) | Trivia (14) | Personal Quotes (3) | Salary (2) Overview (4) 5' 3" (1.6 m) Mini Bio (2) The daughter of a fur wholesaler in Norway, Sonja Henie received her first pair of ice skates when she was six. At 14 she was the Norwegian Skating Champion. At 15 she would win the Olympic gold medal in Skating, a feat she would repeat in 1932 and 1936. In 1936 she would turn professional and tour with her own ice show. She was signed by 20th Century-Fox and debuted in One in a Million (1936), in which she played an ice skater. The picture was very successful, Sonja continued to make a series of light comedies throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s.

More a testament to her skating skills and physical appearance than her acting prowess, the films were nevertheless profitable and her popularity soared. Her films' success garnered financial success for the Hollywood Ice Revues that she produced and starred every year. Her movie career wound down during the mid-'40s, but she continued skating until she retired in 1960. An astute businesswoman and due to marrying shipping magnate Niels Onstad ("the Onassis of Norway") in 1956, Sonja was one of the ten wealthiest women in the world when she died of leukemia in 1969. Trivia (14) Accomplished skier and tennis player Won 3 olympic gold medals between 1928 and 1936. She was the first skater to parlay her athletic success into a lucrative career. 10 time World Champion Women's Figure Skating according to A&E Biography She was the youngest Olympic skating champion - 15 years and 10 months of age when she won the 1928 gold medal. This record was beaten only in 1998 by a two-month younger American 'Tara Lipinski'.

Lost popularity when a photograph was published showing her shaking hands with Adolf Hitler . The photograph of her shaking hands with Adolf Hitler was taken at the 1936 Olympic Winter Games in Germany, and Hitler - being the host nations leader - naturally met several contestants. In that context many claim it's not fair to really judge any of the athletes who encountered Hitler at the games, while others claim Henie should have refused to shake his hand. It is of course easy to judge in retrospect, knowing what we know today of Hitler's later crimes against humanity. Robbed of jewels twice in six months in 1952 Accumulated a large collection of modern art together with her third husband that formed the basis for the Henie-Onstad Art Centre in the city of Tampere, about 200 km from Oslo. They are buried on the hilltop overlooking the museum. Became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1941. Inducted into the World Figure Skating Hall of Fame (1976) and the International Women's Sport Hall of Fame (1982). The signature of her ice skate blades adorns the cement at Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

In 1940, when the Nazis invaded Norway, she was out of the country. She telegraphed her maid and told her to place a picture of her with Hitler, which he had autographed, in a prominent place in her house. When the Nazis arrived to take over the house, they saw the picture and left quickly. For the rest of the war, all of her possessions were left untouched by the Nazis. After she turned pro, she staged a series of successful ice-skating shows with Arthur Wirtz . Daughter of Wilhelm Henie . Personal Quotes (3) [on studio publicity promoting what was an imaginary romance with Tyrone Power] We had to consult the gossip columns every day to see if we were still in love or not. I want to do with skates what Fred Astaire is doing with dancing. Jewelry takes people's minds off your wrinkles. Salary (2)

Question: In which sport did Hollywood star Sonja Henie win Olympic Gold?
Answer: Ice Skating