Remem­ber­ing Son­ja Henie: Hollywood’s first (and only) skat­ing superstar

Under the watch of Adolf Hitler and an inter­na­tion­al crowd, Son­ja Henie was com­pet­ing for her third gold medal in fig­ure skat­ing at the 1936 Olympic Games. She had just signed a con­tract at 20^th Cen­tu­ry Fox, and after these Games she retired to focus on a career in film. Going into the final skate, Henie was just three points ahead of Cecil­ia Colledge, a 15-year-old skater from Lon­don. Out­raged by such a nar­row lead, observers not­ed that ​“Henie ripped the post­ed scores off the wall and tore them to shreds.” But in the final round Henie deliv­ered a near-per­fect rou­tine, win­ning the gold medal and a stand­ing ova­tion. It was the defin­ing moment of her life, one that came to haunt her less than a decade later.

Back in Hol­ly­wood, Henie was prepar­ing for her debut per­for­mance in One in a Mil­lion, a vague­ly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal ice skat­ing musi­cal about a the­atre man­ag­er (Adolph Men­jou) who dis­cov­ers Henie com­pet­ing at the St Moritz Olympics in Switzer­land (where she claimed her sec­ond gold medal). He brings her to Amer­i­ca to per­form at Madi­son Square Gar­dens in front of a sell-out crowd, mir­ror­ing her real-life dis­cov­ery a cou­ple of years earlier.

Gos­sip colum­nists were swoon­ing over Henie even before see­ing the film, describ­ing her as ​“a Degas bal­le­ri­na on skates.” Not unlike Hitler, who admired Henie for uphold­ing an Aryan ide­al, they gushed about ​“her nat­ur­al blondness and dim­ples and daz­zling Nor­we­gian smile.” She became Hollywood’s first (and only) skat­ing super­star. One in a Mil­lion is a slight but charm­ing film that show­cas­es Heni’s nat­ur­al charis­ma. Long before the era of eas­i­ly acces­si­ble sports broad­cast­ing, it allowed the Amer­i­can pub­lic to wit­ness a world-class skater per­form­ing at the peak of her pow­ers. The film was a huge hit.

To this day, Henie remains the most suc­cess­ful female ath­lete ever to cross over to the sil­ver screen. She went on to make a string of suc­cess­ful films, enabling her to stay in Amer­i­ca and avoid the encroach­ing war in Europe. The best of these films is Sun Val­ley Ser­e­nade from 1941, a some­what con­vo­lut­ed sto­ry set at the Sun Val­ley Lodge which boasts some of the most stun­ning musi­cal sequences ever com­mit­ted to film.

In a faux-out­door rink, direc­tor H Bruce Hum­ber­stone and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Edward Cron­jager decid­ed to cov­er the sur­face in black ink to reflects the skater’s move­ments like an onyx mir­ror. With chore­og­ra­phy by Her­mes Pan, best known for his work with Fred Astaire and Gin­ger Rogers in films like Top Hat, Swing Time and Shall We Dance, the skaters move across the screen with grace and sophis­ti­ca­tion. Where the cam­era is some­what timid in One in a Mil­lion, here the cin­e­matog­ra­phy is at once inti­mate and expansive.

Soon, how­ev­er, Henie’s career was in decline. Writ­ing about the 1943 film Win­ter­time for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther described Henie’s recent act­ing gigs as suf­fer­ing from an ​“almost insuf­fer­able monot­o­ny of pat­tern and style.” Henie had been a hero in her native Nor­way, but was now com­ing under heavy crit­i­cism at home. Not only was she accused of hid­ing in Amer­i­ca, but rumours began to cir­cu­late about her alleged sym­pa­thies with Nazi Ger­many. After the 1936 Olympics, Henie is said to have become an acquain­tance of Hitler, and it should be not­ed that it wasn’t until Pearl Har­bour that she pub­licly con­demned him. Even when she joined oth­er Hol­ly­wood stars in rais­ing mon­ey for bonds, she failed to voice her sup­port for the Nor­we­gian resis­tance. Although her cars and dog were stolen dur­ing the occu­pa­tion, her house was left untouched, lead­ing many to sus­pect that Hitler was pro­tect­ing her assets and family.

By 1945, Henie’s film career was all but over, but she con­tin­ued to per­form for large crowds as part of the ​‘Hol­ly­wood Ice Revue’ for anoth­er decade. At the height of her skat­ing career she was earn­ing over $2 mil­lion a year and by the time of her death in 1969 she was worth an esti­mat­ed $45 mil­lion. In 1977 Henie was vot­ed the all-time great­est ice skater by an inter­na­tion­al pan­el. Her impact on skat­ing should be mea­sured not only in terms of the acco­lades she received but in the way she broke down class bar­ri­ers by intro­duc­ing the sport to a wider audience.