Sonja Henie was born in 1912 in Oslo,
Norway. She started to ice skate when she
was five years old. At age nine, Sonja won
her first skating competition. Her family
decided that Sonja should start to train
seriously. Her father helped her, and she
won her first national championship. Sonja
was only 11 years old when she
represented Norway in the Olympics in
1924. She finished in last place, but she got
a lot of attention because she was so
young.
Sonja continued to train. She
became a world champion and won a gold
medal at the 1928 Olympics.
She won two
more gold medals in 1932 and 1936.
Between 1917 and 1936, Sonja Henie won
a total of 1,473 awards.
Henie had a very strong influence on
women's figure skating. For example, she
introduced music and choreography to
skating. (Choreography is when you plan
your dance to music.) She also introduced
glamour to skating.
Women skaters used
to wear long, dark dresses. Henie wore
beautiful, short, white costumes.
After she became a professional in 1936,
Henie moved to Hollywood. She wanted to
be a movie star! She appeared in several
movies, and she skated in all of them.The
movie company paid her $ 150,000 a year,
svhich was a lot of money at that time.
Sonja
Hlenie was a great success once again.
Everyone wanted to see Henie's movies
because they were glamorous and
spectacular. Henie skated in ice shows
ilso. She went on a world tour with the ice
ihows, and the performances were always
;old out. Her movie fans went to her ice
shows and her skating fans went to her
novies. When Henie appeared, there was
always a crowd. Sonja Henie was a big star.
Henie was also a tough businesswoman.
She made sure no one cheated her in her
movie contracts or her ice shows. She
loved money.
At age 26, she was a
millionaire. She became the richest athlete
of her time. Henie married three times. All
her husbands were millionaires too.
Henie liked people to know that she
was rich. She rode in a white Rolls Royce.
She wore white dresses and a lot of
jewelry. She lived in a mansion in
Hollywood, and she had a chauffeur, a
maid, a cook, a secretary, and a hairdresser.
She gave big parties and invited all the
most famous people to them. For one
part}', she put a tent over her tennis courts
and hired people to fly to Hawaii just to
get the best flowers.
There were ice
carvings everywhere and swans in the
swimming pools. She always had the best
food and drinks at her parties too.
Henie worked hard for her money.
She
worked very long hours. When she worked
on a film, she got up at five o'clock in the
morning, worked for 12 hours, came
home, had dinner, and went to bed early.
When she was on tour, she stayed up all
night and slept half the day.
Her diet was
mainly raw eggs and raw beef. She wanted
to have a healthy diet, but she ate very few
vegetables.
In 1968, Henie and her third husband
opened an art center outside of Oslo. This
multimillion-dollar center contains most of
her awards and her art collection, which is
one of the best in the world. Fourteen
months after the center opened, Sonja
Henie died of cancer at the age of 57.
