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Norwegianness in Hollywood: how the Hollywood version of Sonja Henie’s persona was interpreted at home

This article focuses on ‘celebrity as cultural formation that has a social function’ (Turner 2010, p. 14). The backdrop for the cultural formation and social function in this case is closely linked to the idea of nationality; or rather Benedict Anderson’s ([1983] 1991) renowned concept of ‘imagined communities’. Anderson argues that what we think of as nations are in fact imagined communities because ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ ([1983] 1991, p. 6). National identity, as many scholars have shown, is a dynamic and relational process (LindeLaursen and Nilsson 1991, Soila et al. 1998, Soila 2005). Celebrities are part of specific social and historical environments, societies and communities, and in a wider historical context, celebrities represent examples of how national identity is constructed by the media at a given time. The object of study is the Norwegian figure skater Sonja Henie (1912–1969). She was a Norwegian three-times Olympic Champion (1928, 1932 and 1936) in Ladies Singles, a 10-times World Champion (1927–1936) and European Champion in consecutive years between 1931 and 1936. Henie won more Olympic and World titles than any other female figure skater. In 1936, when Henie was 24 and world famous, she gave up her sports career and pursued a career as a film actress instead. By the end of that year, she had signed a lucrative five-year contract with Darryl F. Zanuck and 20th Century Fox, and she was launched in the leading role in her American debut One in a Million (1936). The film immediately became a box-office hit in the USA. From 1936 for the next 12 years, Henie starred in 11 Hollywood productions. In the late 1930s, she was in Hollywood’s top ten list of most popular stars – and in her own words America had become ‘iceminded’ (Henie 1938). In parallel with her film career, Henie toured the USA with her ice shows, and these shows seemed to reinforce her popularity. Henie took the skating routines from her films and repeated them in her performances. It was during this period that she created the ‘Hollywood Ice Revue’, and in 1947 more than 15 million Americans had paid over US$25 million to see her ice shows (Stenseth 2002, p. 198). At the time, Henie was believed to be the richest woman in the world. In the 1930s, Norway – which gained its independence in 1905 – was a very young nation, and still in the process of creating a common national community or identity.