October 13, 1969
OBITUARY
Sonja Henie, Skating Star, Dies
BY THE NEW YORK TIMES
OSLO, Oct. 12 (AP)--Sonja Henie, ice-skating queen and film star, died tonight on an ambulance plane flying from Paris to Oslo. She was 57 years old.
Miss Henie had been suffering from leukemia for the last nine months. In Paris yesterday her condition worsened, and it was decided to fly her home.
Her husband, Neils Onstad, a Norwegian shipowner, said she "just slept away" halfway through the two-hour flight.
Champion and Star
Three times the Olympic figure-skating champion, Miss Henie won most of the major world skating titles from 1927 to 1936, when she turned professional.
A petite, glamorous woman with a taste for luxury and a shrewd business sense, she was immensely successful next with a series of her own ice revues, and prospered as a motion picture star.
After her marriage to Mr. Onstad, a childhood sweetheart, in 1956, she became interested in modern art. The Onstads gave Norway an art museum and 250 of their paintings in August 1968.
Two earlier marriages to Americans, Daniel Reid Topping and Winthrop Gardiner Jr., ended in divorces in 1946 and 1956. She had become an American citizen in 1941.
Miss Henie had a home in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles, an apartment in Lausanne, Switzerland, and an estate overlooking the Oslo fjord.
Skated as 6-year-old
Born in Oslo on April 8, 1912, Miss Henie received her first skates from her father, a Norwegian fur wholesaler, on the Christmas after her sixth birthday. She had already delighted in dancing, and--with her brother Leif giving her her first lessons--enjoyed
skating even more.
While improving her skating, in the next few years, she also studied ballet with a former teacher of Anna Pavlova, and eventually she combined the two forms on ice.
She won the children's figure skating championship of Oslo when she was 8, and two years later, in 1923, she won the figure skating championship of Norway.
She entered her first Olympic Winter Games the next year, primarily for experience, and took third place in the free skating competition.
Practicing as much as seven hours a day, she studied with teachers in Germany, England, Switzerland and Austria. With her well-to-do father's backing, she studied ballet in London, and began applying choreography to her routines. Her mother traveled
with her constantly, as she did throughout Miss Henie's career.
She won the first of 10 consecutive world skating titles at Oslo in 1927, captivating the crowd with her ballet style, a white silk and ermine costume and short skirt and a dimpled smile.
Over the next decade Miss Henie won Olympic titles at St. Moritz, Switzerland (1928), at Lake Placid (1932), and at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria (1936).
She announced then that she was turning professional, and toured the United States in an ice show. She said her greatest hope was to become a movie star, and she soon did.
"I want to do with skates (in the movies) what Fred Astaire is doing with dancing," she said.
First Movie in 1936
She signed with Darrly F. Zanuck and 20th Century-Fox, and her first skating film, "One in a Million," was released at the end of 1936.
It was a box-office smash, as were others she made in the following dozen years. The pictures were reported to have grossed $25-million.
She herself earned over $200,000 from her film work alone in 1937.
She also began staging and appearing in ice shows, in association with Arthur Wirtz, her business manager, and these, too, were very successful--with lavish costumes and spectacular routines.
These shows, the "Hollywood Ice Revues," were major attractions at Madison Square Garden for many years, up to 1952.
Miss Henie was an exacting star. She once called Eddie Pec, the only person she permitted to sharpen her skates, in New York, to ask him to come to Chicago, where her show was to open.
He hopped on a train, reached Chicago the next day, rushed to her hotel, and sharpened the skates with a hand stone--a few minutes work.
"Anything else?" he asked. "No, thank you," she said sweetly. "That's all." And back he went to New York.
She broke with her manager in 1951, and began producing shows on her own, but gave them up after a block of seats at a Baltimore armory collapsed before a show in March, 1952, injuring more than 250 people.
Although later cleared of any responsibility for the accident, she did not stage any more arena- type shows. She appeared on several television shows in the next few years, including a one- hour special of her own.
Shows More Demanding
Commenting on the difference between skating in her shows and in competition, Miss Henie once said:
"When I was in championship competition I was on the ice for exactly four minutes. Now I arrive at the Garden at 6:45 and I never stop until 11:10. Besides, I can't quite imagine my doing the hula in the Olympics."
Her illness had been a well-kept secret. Less than two weeks ago she attended a theater performance in Oslo with her husband.
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