Fremstad, Olive (1871-1951). Swedish-American opera singer. Born in Sweden, Ann Olivia Rundquist was adopted by a Scandinavian-American couple, the Fremstads, who raised her first in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway, and then in Minnesota. She moved to New York City to study piano in 1890 and then to Germany to study voice with Lilli Lehmann. After a successful career in Europe as a mezzo-soprano, she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1903, where she specialized in singing soprano roles in operas by Richard Wagner. Willa Cather first met Fremstad in 1913 while researching “Three American Singers,” an article for McClure’s Magazine in which Cather clearly prefers Fremstad as “the most interesting kind of American” over Geraldine Farrar and Louise Homer. Through 1916 Cather and Fremstad were in close and regular contact in person and through letters, although Cather’s letters to Fremstad have not been located and their friendship evidently cooled. Fremstad inspired many aspects of the story, personality, and career of Thea Kronborg, heroine of The Song of the Lark (1915), and she approved of the novel, although Cather did not want readers to identify the character too closely with her. Fremstad married and divorced twice. During the period Cather and Fremstad were in regular contact Fremstad lived as a couple with Mary Watkins (later Cushing) who, after Fremstad’s death, published a biography of her, The Rainbow Bridge (1954).