Nicolai Johannsen

Biography

A Christmas-week baby sneaked into the world on 17 December 1885 somewhere along Norway’s craggy coast, christened Nicolai Johannsen. By his late twenties he had swapped fjords for footlights, stepping in front of a camera just as cinema itself was learning to walk. In 1914 he tempted audiences in In the Hour of Temptation, followed a year later by a brush with mortality in En Død i Skønhed, and in 1916 he stole a princess’s heart in Prinsessens Hjerte. Forty-nine winters after that snowy birthday, on 13 September 1935, the curtain came down for good.