Hedvig Raa-Winterhjelm
| Hedvig Raa-Winterhjelm | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Charlotta Forssman 20 November 1838 Stockholm, Sweden |
| Died | 7 March 1907 (aged 68) Stockholm, Sweden |
| Other names | Charlotta Raa |
| Spouse(s) | Fritiof Raa (first husband) |
Hedvig Raa-Winterhjelm, née Charlotta Forssman (20 November 1838 – 7 March 1907), was a Swedish actor active in Sweden, Norway and Finland. She played a pioneer role in Finland by introducing the Finnish language as a stage language, becoming the first actor in Finland to speak her lines in the Finnish tongue.
Hedvig Raa-Winterhjelm was born as the daughter of a goldsmith in Stockholm in Sweden under the name Charlotte Forssman. She studied at the Dramatens elevskola in in 1854–56, after which she toured in travelling theater companies in Sweden and Finland.
In 1860, she was employed at the Mindre teatern in Stockholm. In 1863, Mindre teatern was taken over by the Royal Dramatic Theatre. Many of the actors was given a contract in the new theatre. The competition with Sweden's leading lady Elise Hwasser made her leave for a position at the theater in Gothenburg, where she was engaged until she left Sweden for a position at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki in 1866.
The Swedish Theatre in Helsinki was the first permanent theater in the city: inaugurated in 1860, it had burned down in 1863 and was reopened in 1866, when Raa-Winterhjelm was employed there. The theater became the first national stage in Finland, and Hedvig Raa-Winterhjelm became its lead actress within romantic tragedy between 1866 and 1872.
In 1866, she married her colleague, the actor Fritiof Raa (1840-1872).
In parallel, Hedvig Raa-Winterhjelm also founded her own Swedish language theater company in 1866. In 1868, the first theater dramatic school in Finland was founded in connection to the theater, and Hedvig Raa-Winterhjelm was made its instructor. As a drama teacher, she worked to introduce the Finnish language on stage. Finland, at that time a Russian province, had been a Swedish province until 1809, and the language spoken on the theater stages in Finland was not Finnish but the Swedish language, which was the second language in Finland and the language of the upper classes: most actors in Finland at the time were from Sweden, or from the Swedish speaking minority in Finland.
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