Charlotte Oelschlägel

Charlotte Oelschlägel, aka Charlotte Hayward (August 14, 1898 – November 14, 1984) was a German professional skater. For most of her life, she used only her first name as her stage name. She invented and first performed the figure skating elements death spiral and Charlotte spiral, which is named after her.

Personal life Charlotte Oelschlägel was born in Berlin. As well as being a figure skater, she was also a musician. At age seven, she was on stage with the Berlin Philharmonic. She played the mandolin, lute, harp and piano. She began skating after a nervous breakdown; a physician recommended she try exercising outdoors to recover, and her mother took her figure skating.

She was married first in 1922 to Anselm Gotzl, a composer and conductor for one of her shows; he died eight months later. She died in a retirement home in Berlin in November 1984. She was known professionally by her first name.

In 1910, she began appearing in ice ballets in Berlin. Around 1914, she saw a performance by Anna Pavlova, which influenced her skating style. She was also the first skater to star in a motion picture, the American drama film The Frozen Warning (1916), which figure skating historian James R. Hines calls "the first motion picture to include figure skating". She also published a book in 1916, The Hippodrome Skating Book, which contained both photographs of herself and instructional material, meant to encourage interest in skating.

Throughout the 1920s, Oelschlägel toured in a variety of countries, including the United States, Mexico, Cuba, Germany, and Spain. She skated in a new show just two days after her first husband's death in 1923; she collapsed two months later and temporarily retired before going on to perform for the rest of the 1920s and 1930s.

Her professional figure skating career ended in 1939. She returned home due to her mother's death and was still in Germany at the beginning of World War II. As she and her husband could not leave the country and would not skate for the Nazis, they were forced to retire. After the end of the war, they traveled to the American occupation zone with only what they could carry; most of their financial assets were left behind in Potsdam, which became part of East Germany. She has been called "figure skating's first major theatrical star".