It’s kind of a shame that the planned biopic starring Oksana Baiul didn’t happen. (Can Oksana Baiul act? Does it matter?) Sonja Henie is an interesting figure in the history of skating, you’ll pardon the pun, and she’s basically vanished from the public consciousness today. Especially now that you’re less likely to randomly encounter M*A*S*H on syndicated TV and see the episode where they’re complaining about having Sun Valley Serenade during a cold snap. “The Hockey Champ” is on Disney+, though “The Autograph Hound” is not.
Henie was one of the first athletes to parlay her success in sports into movie stardom. She was nine years older than Esther Williams, and their careers had very little overlap in time. Johnny Weissmuller was Tarzan slightly before Henie stopped competing. Apparently, being an actress in Hollywood had always been her ambition; she was worried about her thick Norwegian accent, but the studio didn’t seem to care, as it didn’t hurt the success of her first movie. She had to learn her lines phonetically, but the movie’s success was great enough so that they never hired her a dialogue coach.
Most people had never seen anything like her—arguably, until that point, there had never been anything like her. She was eleven the first time she competed in the Olympics; she placed eighth. She would go on to win three Olympic championships in a row and ten world championships, a feat still unmatched. There are things she didn’t do that current skaters can, but also she didn’t completely ruin her body in the way that figure skaters now have when they finish their competitive years. She did indeed successfully make her move to Hollywood.
In a way, her Hollywood career was more impressive simply because of the technical complication of skating in Technicolor. If you know where to look, you can see the water on top of the ice in her movies, because the lights were so hot that not even Freon pipes under the rink were enough to combat it. It cannot have been the easiest of circumstances in which to have worked, and she kept at it. She made a dozen movies in as many years.
The problem, of course, was the Hitler thing. She was photographed shaking his hand in the 1936 Olympics. She also gave the Nazi salute once at those Olympics and had lunch with Hitler. So that’s not a good look and wasn’t popular in Norway for some reason. Though she later said her prominent display of the inscribed picture of him protected her house and property during the war, which she spent doing work for the Allies. She seems to have been mostly apolitical, but that’s kind of awkward given, you know, Hitler. She said she mostly sucked up because she was supposed to have a Norwegian judge that year and didn’t, so making nice to the Germans was a calculated choice. If not in the long term.
I’m nowhere near a Henie-level prodigy, but also I’m not pictured with any Nazis, so it would be nice if you’d support my Patreon or Ko-fi!