Background

Hedy Lamarr was originally Hedwig Eva Kiesler, born on November 9, 1914, in Vienna, Austria, into a well-to-do Jewish family. An only child, Lamarr received a great deal of attention from her father, a bank director and curious man, who inspired her to look at the world with open eyes. He would often take her for long walks where he would discuss the inner-workings of different machines, like the printing press or street cars. These conversations guided Lamarr's thinking and at only 5 years of age, she could be found taking apart and reassembling her music box to understand how the machine operated. Meanwhile, Lamarr's mother was a concert pianist and introduced her to the arts, placing her in both ballet and piano lessons from a young age.

Education

Hedy Lamarr was privately tutored from age 4. By the time she was 10, she was a proficient pianist and dancer and could speak four languages. At age 16 she enrolled in Max Reinhardt's Berlin-based dramatic school (now Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts), and within a year she made her motion picture debut in Geld auf der Strasse (1930; Money on the Street). She achieved both stardom and notoriety in the Czech film Extase (1932; Ecstasy), in which she briefly but tastefully appeared in the nude.

Career

Lamarr's first film in the United States was Algiers (1938), in which she played opposite French actor Charles Boyer as a woman who, though engaged to another man, has an affair with an escaped thief. The film was a successful launch for Lamarr's American career, but it was followed by two flops, Lady of the Tropics (1939) and I Take This Woman (1940), the latter co-starring Spencer Tracy and dubbed I Re-Take This Woman after Mayer demanded numerous changes in the script. The actress's fortunes turned around later in 1940 with Boom Town, with Clark Gable in the lead role, and Comrade X, a sort of anti-Communist romance in which Lamarr played a Soviet streetcar driver who falls in love with an American reporter.

Throughout World War II, Lamarr was a fixture on American movie screens with such films as Come Live with Me (1941), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), and the steamy White Cargo (1943), in which Lamarr played a mixed-race prostitute on an African rubber plantation (although censors demanded that references to her character's ethnicity be removed from the script). With such films as 1943's The Heavenly Body, Lamarr emerged in the first rank of screen sex symbols. A poll of Columbia University male undergraduates ranked Lamarr as the actress they would most like to be marooned with on an island, and in 1942 Lamarr participated in the World War II mobilization effort by offering to kiss any man who would purchase $25,000 in War Bonds. She raised $17 million with 680 kisses. In 1943, Lamarr was rumored to have been in the running for (or to have turned down) the role that eventually went to Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca.

Composer George Antheil played an important role in Lamarr's life as a collaborator on an important electronics innovation. Lamarr was slightly dismissive of her glamorous image, saying, "Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid." Lamar, by contrast, had been astute enough to pick up a good deal of practical knowledge pertaining to munitions engineering during her marriage to Mandl. In 1940 she had the idea for a solution to the problem of controlling a radio-guided torpedo.

The pair were jointly awarded a patent for their discovery, but Antheil later credited the original idea entirely to Lamarr. Credit did not matter, however, for the idea, later given the name of frequency hopping, was never applied by the military during World War II. It was later rediscovered independently and used in ships sent to Cuba during the missile crisis of 1962. The real payoff of frequency hopping came only decades later, when it became integral to the operation of cellular telephones and Bluetooth systems that enabled computers to communicate with peripheral devices. By that time, Lamarr and Antheil's patent had long since expired.

Experiment Perilous (1944), directed by Jacques Tourneur, was considered one of Lamarr's best films, but her career gradually declined after World War II. The most visible outing from this phase of her career was the Cecil B. DeMille-produced Samson and Delilah (1949), with Victor Mature and Lamarr in the title roles. The film, in Horak's words, "marries an Old Testament-style, evangelical Christian moralism with the theatrical exploitation of unadulterated sex." For David Thomson of London's Independent on Sunday, the film had "many moments where [Lamarr's] foreign voice, her basilisk gaze, and her sinful body combine to magnificent effect."

Lamarr made several films in the 1950s, mostly operating outside of the Hollywood system. In the 1954 Italian-made feature The Loves of Three Queens she played Helen of Troy, and she took on another historical role as Joan of Arc in The Story of Mankind (1958). Her heyday was past, however, and she stayed away from Hollywood for much of the time. In 1950 she sold off all of her possessions in an auction and announced that she was moving to Mexico. A marriage brought her back to the United States and to Texas in 1955, and in retirement, she moved to Florida. Occasionally she appeared on television. In 1967 she published an autobiography, Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman, but sued the ghostwriters she had employed, claiming, that the book was "fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libelous, and obscene."

In 1960, Lamarr was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6247 Hollywood Blvd adjacent to Vine Street.

That was one of several episodes that saw Lamarr entering courtrooms in her later years. Lamarr was arrested in 1966 for shoplifting at Macy's department store but was acquitted. She complained to a columnist that she had once had a $7 million income but by the late 1960s was subsisting on a $48-a-week pension. Another round of litigation came after the release of director Mel Brooks's Western film parody Blazing Saddles in 1974; the actress objected to the fanciful "Hedley Lamarr" name of one of the movie's characters.

Lamarr lived mostly in isolation in a small house in Orlando in the last years of her life, reportedly staying out of the spotlight partly because of unsuccessful plastic surgery. She antagonized the organizers of a film festival with unreasonable demands for a makeup retinue. In 1990, however, she had a cameo role in the satire Instant Karma, and she lived long enough to see a modest renewal of interest in the sexually independent persona she had often projected on film. The story of her radio transmission invention also became widely publicized in the 1990s, and she received an Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1997, although she never received any monetary award for her ingenuity.

Hedy Lamarr suffered from several heart diseases during her later years and died in Casselberry, Florida, United States on January 19, 2000, at the age of 85.

Achievements

• As an actress, Hedy Lamarr's most memorable role was in the movie White Cargo (1942), which was based on a Broadway hit play by Leon Gordon. The film, in which she plays a beautiful seductress, was one of her biggest commercial hits. Lamarr has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd in recognition of her contribution to the motion picture industry.
  
  Hedy Lamarr in collaboration with George Antheil co-created a frequency-hopping system to help combat the Nazis in World War II. The duo's invention, though not much recognized during their lifetimes, served as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as Bluetooth, COFDM, and CDMA. Lamarr, along with George Antheil, was honored with awards from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the 1990s in recognition of their contribution to technology. Moreover, they were inducted into the Inventor's Hall of Fame in 2014.
  
  Asteroid 32730 Lamarr, discovered by Karl Reinmuth in 1951, was named in her memory.
  
  On November 9, 2015, a Google "doodle" marked Lamarr's 101st birthday.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman 1966

• movie

  • Ecstasy

    (Eva has just gotten married to an older gentleman but dis...)

    1940
  • Algiers

    (A thief lives in the Kasbah of Algiers but is captive the...)

    1938
  • The Strange Woman

    (In 1820s Maine, beautiful Jenny Hager (Hedy Lamarr) knows...)

    1946
  • The Conspirators 1944

Politics

Hedy Lamarr was strongly against fascism and nazism. Her first husband was chummy with Hitler and Mussolini - and she hated him for it.

Views

After the United States entered World War II in 1941, everyone felt they should contribute to the war effort, including Lamarr. She didn't just want to sell war bonds and tour with the USO, though.

Together with composer, author, and inventor George Antheil, she researched radio-controlled torpedoes. These torpedoes could be easily jammed by broadcasting interference. Lamarr remembered what she had learned in her meetings with Mandl, and she and Antheil began to experiment with frequency-hopping technology.

The two referred to their project as the Secret Communications System. Their device could change radio frequencies, which would help keep the enemy from decoding messages. The device was designed to switch radio signals in short bursts among 88 frequencies in order to prevent the enemy from jamming the signals. They were granted a patent in 1942, but their invention was never used in World War II.

Like many famous stars of her day, Lamarr had a relationship with aerospace pioneer Howard Hughes. She helped Hughes streamline his aircraft design. In rare, long-lost cassette tapes from the 1990s, Lamarr describes her contributions to aerospace engineering: "I thought the aeroplanes were too slow. I decided that's not right. They shouldn't be square, the wings. So I bought a book of fish, and I bought a book of birds, and then used the fastest bird, connected it with the fastest fish. And I drew it together and showed it to Howard Hughes and then he said, 'You're a genius.' "

Quotations: "I know why most people never get rich. They put the money ahead of the job. If you just think of the job, the money will automatically follow. This never fails."

"Analysis gave me great freedom of emotions and fantastic confidence. I felt I had served my time as a puppet."

"Confidence is something you're born with. I know I had loads of it even at the age of 15."

"I don't fear death because I don't fear anything I don't understand."

"I have not been that wise. Health I have taken for granted. Love I have demanded, perhaps too much and too often. As for money, I have only realized its true worth when I didn't have it."

"I was in constant demand, in my professional life and my personal life."

"Jack Kennedy always said to me, Hedy, get involved. That’s the secret of life. Try everything. Join everything. Meet everybody."

"Some men like a dull life - they like the routine of eating breakfast, going to work, coming home, petting the dog, watching TV, kissing the kids, and going to bed. Stay clear of it - it's often catching."

"Hope & curiosity about the future seemed better than guarantees. The unknown was always so attractive to me... and still is."

"All creative people want to do the unexpected."

"If you do good, people will accuse you of being selfish, ulterior motives."

"Think Big."

"Give the world the best you've got. And you will get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you've got anyway."

"If I were to name my favourite past time I'd say talking about myself. I love it and I think most other people do too. We need people like us, more listeners and less talkers."

Personality

Hedy Lamarr was more than just a pretty face: she had a natural mathematical ability and a lifelong love of tinkering with ideas for inventions. "My face has been my misfortune," she once observed, describing it as "a mask I cannot remove. I must live with it. I curse it."

Physical Characteristics: Lamarr had natural brunette hair, pale skin, green eyes, voluptuous figure, and seductive deep voice.

During her heyday, Lamarr was considered the most beautiful woman in the world. Her face was the inspiration for Disney's Snow White and for Catwoman.

Interests

• Inventing

Connections

In 1933, Hedy Lamarr married Friedrich Mandl, a wealthy merchant, while she was still a teenager. Her husband was too controlling and thus she ended this marriage in 1937.

She was briefly married to screenwriter and producer, Gene Markey, from 1939 to 1941. She adopted a son, James, during this marriage.

Her third marriage to actor John Loder, in 1943, produced two biological children, Denise and Anthony. This marriage ended in divorce in 1947.

Lamarr married three more times but none of these marriages too lasted for long. Her last three husbands were Ernest "Ted" Stauffer (married 1951-1952), Willam Howard Lee (married 1953-1960), and Lewis J. Boies (married 1963-1965).

Father:

Emil Kiesler

Mother:

Gertrud Lichtwitz Kiesler

ex-spouse:

Friedrich Mandl

ex-spouse:

Gene Markey

ex-spouse:

John Loder

ex-spouse:

Ernest Stauffer

ex-spouse:

Willam Howard Lee

ex-spouse:

Lewis J. Boies

Son:

James

Daughter:

Denise

Son:

Anthony

Acquaintance:

Howard Hughes

Friend:

George Antheil

References

• Hedy Lamarr's Double Life: Hollywood Legend and Brilliant Inventor
  2018