Sonja Henie Trivia
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48 free Sonja Henie trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Sonja Henie trivia quiz covers the Norwegian who dominated women's figure skating for a decade and then became one of Hollywood's highest-paid stars. The easy questions handle the basics: her country, her three Olympic golds, the studio that signed her and the white boots and short skirts she made standard. From there it moves into the record books, from her last-place finish at eleven to the ten straight world titles no woman has matched. The harder end is for skating historians and old-movie fans: the disputed 1927 judging in Oslo, the torn-up scoresheet and lucky draw at Garmisch in 1936, the ballerina her father hired as a coach, the Glenn Miller film that produced the first gold record, her three husbands including a future Yankees owner, the ice-show war with Arthur Wirtz, the lunch with Hitler that outraged Norway, and the modern-art centre outside Oslo that bears her name. There are also questions on the Disney and Caddyshack references that kept her name alive. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for Henie, her films, her rivals and the Olympic Games she skated in before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our figure skating, Winter Olympics and classic Hollywood quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Henie won her Olympic titles for Norway, then became a citizen of which country in 1941?
United States
United States: she had settled in Hollywood, and when asked to help Norway's war effort she declined, saying her interests now lay in America; she gave later, but many Norwegians held the refusal against her.
Q 02Henie's ten world titles equalled the record of which Swedish champion, whose name lives on in a skating jump?
Ulrich Salchow
Ulrich Salchow won his ten between 1901 and 1911; Henie's came in one unbroken run from 1927, which ended only because she turned professional in 1936, still unbeaten.
Q 03Henie's father Wilhelm had been a world champion in which sport?
Cycling
Cycling: Wilhelm Henie won a track world title in 1894 and also raced at the European speed skating championships, and he drove his daughter just as hard, taking her out of school as a child to skate full time.
Q 04As she turned professional in 1936, Henie said she wanted to do with skates what which star did with dancing?
Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire was the model she named to a reporter a month after her third Olympic title, and by the end of that year her first skating musical was in cinemas.
Q 05Which Russian ballerina was the young Henie's idol and the model for the dance she brought to skating?
Anna Pavlova
Anna Pavlova. From the age of five Henie took ballet lessons with one of Pavlova's former teachers, and a 1928 film of her skating was titled The Pavlova of the Ice.
Q 06At the 1924 Winter Olympics, aged eleven, Henie finished in what position?
Eighth of eight
Eighth of eight, behind the Austrian winner Herma Szabo. Just three years later, aged 14, Henie beat the same Szabo to take the first of her world titles.
Q 07Why was Henie's first world title, won at home in 1927, controversial?
Three of the five judges were Norwegian
Three of the five judges were Norwegian, and all three placed her first while the Austrian and German judges chose Herma Szabo; the skating union then limited panels to one judge per country.
Q 08Which skater's 1988 win made her the first woman since Henie to retain the Olympic singles title?
Katarina Witt
Katarina Witt held off the American Debi Thomas in Calgary in a duel remembered as the Battle of the Carmens, because both women had chosen to skate to Bizet's opera.
Q 09Henie was born in 1912 in Kristiania, the Norwegian city known since 1925 by which name?
Oslo
Oslo took back its old name in 1925, when Henie was 12 and already an Olympian; she had grown up a short walk from the Frogner rink where she learned to skate.
Q 10At which resort did Henie win her first Olympic gold in 1928?
St. Moritz
St. Moritz was hit by a thaw that forced one speed skating race to be abandoned, and during the women's free skate red flags marked the worst patches of the outdoor ice.
Q 11Henie's second Olympic gold came in 1932 at the first Winter Games to stage figure skating indoors, in which US town?
Lake Placid
Lake Placid's Olympic Arena put the skaters under a roof for the first time at a Winter Games; four years earlier a thaw had ruined the outdoor ice.
Q 12Henie's closest rival at the 1936 Olympics, 15-year-old Cecilia Colledge, skated for which country?
Britain
Britain. Colledge had first skated at the Olympics aged 11, and once Henie left for Hollywood the way was clear: she won the world title in London the following year.
Q 13After the 1936 Olympic school figures, what did Henie reportedly do with the results sheet?
Tore it into little pieces
Q 21In Thin Ice (1937), Henie's skate instructor falls for a skier who is secretly what?
A prince
A prince, travelling incognito to escape his royal duties. The skiing in the film was not Henie's own: her stand-in on the slopes was Gretchen Fraser, later an Olympic ski champion.
Q 22Which Broadway star sang alongside Henie in the 1938 musical Happy Landing?
Ethel Merman
Ethel Merman plays the girlfriend a bandleader has waiting at home when his plane makes a forced landing in Norway, where a mix-up leaves Henie's village girl sure they are engaged, and she follows him across the Atlantic.
Q 23Second Fiddle (1939) parodied the search for an actress to play which famous role?
Scarlett O'Hara
Tore it into little pieces, by one account: she led Cecilia Colledge by only a few points, and suspicion grew when the draw then let her skate last while Colledge went second of 26.
Q 14The 1936 Winter Olympics, site of Henie's third gold, were held in which German town?
Garmisch-Partenkirchen
Garmisch-Partenkirchen had been two separate market towns until the Nazi authorities forced them to merge on 1 January 1935, a year before the Games.
Q 15Which relative of Henie co-wrote Queen of Ice, Queen of Shadows, an unsparing 1985 biography of her?
Her brother
Her brother, Leif Henie, had first taken her onto the ice and given her her earliest lessons; decades later his book with Raymond Strait catalogued her flaws, from tight-fistedness to drink.
Q 16Henie's 1941 hit Sun Valley Serenade is set at a ski resort in which US state?
Idaho
Idaho. Henie plays a war refugee whom a band pianist agrees to sponsor as a publicity stunt, expecting a child; the grown woman who arrives follows the band to Sun Valley and wins him.
Q 17Henie is credited with popularising which items, now standard in women's figure skating?
White boots and the short skirt
White boots and the short skirt: at 14 she won her first world title in a skirt cut above the knee, which freed her legs for the jumps that long skirts had left to the men.
Q 18Which Hollywood studio chief signed Henie to a long-term film contract in 1936?
Darryl Zanuck
Darryl Zanuck was won over by two ice shows her father staged in Los Angeles before a crowd of film stars, and when he offered only a minor part she held out until he gave her leading roles.
Q 19What was the title of Henie's 1936 Hollywood debut film?
One in a Million
One in a Million cast her as an Olympic hopeful warned not to risk her amateur status, a plot filmed only months after Henie had given up her own to turn professional.
Q 20Which matinee idol was Henie's leading man in both Thin Ice and Second Fiddle?
Tyrone Power
Tyrone Power was also, friends said, the great love of her life, but in 1939, the year of their second film together, he married the French actress Annabella.
Scarlett O'Hara: Henie plays a Minnesota schoolteacher plucked from obscurity for a much-hyped film role, and the publicist who found her falls for her himself while staging her fake romance with another star.
Q 24Which bandleader's orchestra featured in Henie's 1941 hit Sun Valley Serenade?
Glenn Miller
Glenn Miller's orchestra appeared in only one other film, and its 'Chattanooga Choo Choo' from this one sold 1.2 million copies, earning what is counted as the first gold record.
Q 25Which future star sings and dances 'Chattanooga Choo Choo' with the Nicholas Brothers in Sun Valley Serenade?
Dorothy Dandridge
Dorothy Dandridge danced the number with the Nicholas Brothers, and the following year she married one of them, Harold Nicholas.
Q 26In Everything Happens at Night (1939), Henie plays the daughter of a Nobel laureate in hiding from which secret police?
The Gestapo
The Gestapo. Two rival reporters trace the peace campaigner to a Swiss village and both fall for his daughter, in a brooding thriller quite unlike her usual skating musicals.
Q 27What set It's a Pleasure (1945) apart from all of Henie's other Hollywood films?
It was shot in colour
It was shot in colour, in Technicolor, and it broke her mould in another way: after years of light musical comedies she played the wife of a hard-drinking hockey player in a melodrama.
Q 28Which Chicago arena owner produced Henie's touring Hollywood Ice Revue?
Arthur Wirtz
Arthur Wirtz saw her as the way to fill arenas across the country, his own Chicago Stadium among them, and signed her to a touring contract about a month after her last Olympic win.
Q 29The theatre where Henie co-produced ice spectaculars throughout the 1940s was part of which Manhattan landmark?
Rockefeller Center
Rockefeller Center rebuilt its loss-making Center Theatre as an ice stage on the strength of Henie's success; it was demolished in 1954, the only building of the original complex to go.
Q 30Henie made her Olympic debut aged eleven at the first Winter Games, held in 1924 in which French resort?
Chamonix
Chamonix. Norway had not planned to send any figure skaters until her father offered to pay the whole trip himself and travel as her coach.