Ragna Wettergreen

Biography

Oslo, 19 September 1864: a winter-blooming girl named Ragna Wettergreen steps into the world. Within decades she will glide from candle-lit stages to the newborn glare of cinema, lending her cool Nordic gaze to three of Norway’s earliest films—the maternal saga *Historien om en moder* (1912), the eerie *Blodets röst* (1913), and the clairvoyant thriller *Madame de Thebes* (1915). Audiences remember the low timbre of her voice long after the last reel flutters out. She lives quietly beyond the spotlight for another forty-three summers, dying in Oslo on 27 June 1958, her century of life book-ended by the same city’s fjords.