hedy lamarr actress biography

Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian American actress during MGM's "Golden Age" who also left her mark on technology. She helped develop an early technique for spread spectrum communications.

(1914-2000)

Who Was Hedy Lamarr?

Hedy Lamarr was an actress during MGM's "Golden Age." She starred in such films as Tortilla Flat, Lady of the Tropics, Boom Town and Samson and Delilah , with the likes of Clark Gable and Spencer Tracey. Lamarr was also a scientist, co-inventing an early technique for spread spectrum communications — the key to many wireless communications of our present day. A recluse later in life, Lamarr died in her Florida home in 2000.

Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on November 9, 1914, in Vienna, Austria. Discovered by an Austrian film director as a teenager, she gained international notice in 1933, with her role in the sexually charged Czech film Ecstasy . After her unhappy marriage ended with Fritz Mandl, a wealthy Austrian munitions manufacturer who sold arms to the Nazis, she fled to the United States and signed a contract with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio in Hollywood under the name Hedy Lamarr. Upon the release of her first American film, Algiers , co-starring Charles Boyer, Lamarr became an immediate box-office sensation.

'Secret Communications System'

In 1942, during the heyday of her career, Lamarr earned recognition in a field quite different from entertainment. She and her friend, the composer George Antheil, received a patent for an idea of a radio signaling device, or "Secret Communications System," which was a means of changing radio frequencies to keep enemies from decoding messages. Originally designed to defeat the German Nazis, the system became an important step in the development of technology to maintain the security of both military communications and cellular phones.

Lamarr wasn't instantly recognized for her communications invention since its wide-ranging impact wasn't understood until decades later. However, in 1997, Lamarr and Antheil were honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Pioneer Award, and that same year Lamarr became the first female to receive the BULBIE™ Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, considered the "Oscars" of inventing.

Later Career

Lamarr's film career began to decline in the 1950s; her last film was 1958's The Female Animal , with Jane Powell. In 1966, she published a steamy best-selling autobiography, Ecstasy and Me , but later sued the publisher for what she saw as errors and distortions perpetrated by the book's ghostwriter. She was arrested twice for shoplifting, once in 1966 and once in 1991, but neither arrest resulted in a conviction.

Personal Life, Death and Legacy

Lamarr was married six times. She adopted a son, James, in 1939, during her second marriage to Gene Markey. She went on to have two biological children, Denise (b. 1945) and Anthony (b. 1947), with her third husband, actor John Loder, who also adopted James.

In 1953, Lamarr completed the naturalization process and became a U.S. citizen.

In her later years, Lamarr lived a reclusive life in Casselberry, a community just north of Orlando, Florida, where she died on January 19, 2000, at the age of 85.

Documentary and Pop Culture

In 2017, director Alexandra Dean shined a light on the Hollywood starlet/unlikely inventor with a new documentary, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story . Along with delving into her pioneering technological work, the documentary explores other examples in which Lamarr proved to be far more than just a pretty face, as well as her struggles with crippling drug addiction.

A dramatized version of Lamarr featured in a March 2018 episode of the TV series Timeless , which centered on her efforts to help the time-traveling team recover a stolen workprint of the 1941 classic Citizen Kane .

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Hedy Lamarr
• Birth Year: 1914
• Birth date: November 9, 1914
• Birth City: Vienna
• Birth Country: Austria
• Best Known For: Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian American actress during MGM's "Golden Age" who also left her mark on technology. She helped develop an early technique for spread spectrum communications.
• Astrological Sign: Scorpio
• Nacionalities
• Interesting Facts
• Hedy Lamarr was arrested twice for shoplifting, in 1966 and 1991, though neither arrest resulted in a conviction.
• Death Year: 2000
• Death date: January 19, 2000
• Death State: Florida
• Death City: Casselberry
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Hedy Lamarr Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/actors/hedy-lamarr
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: April 19, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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Hedy Lamarr

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• BBC - Hedy Lamarr: Racy actor and technology pioneer
• Jewish Women's Archive - Biography of Hedy Lamarr
• American Physical Society - Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil submit patent for radio frequency hopping
• Warfare History Network - Hedy Lamarr: Allied Inventor and Actress
• National Women's History Museum - Biograpghy of Hedy Lamarr
• Official Site of Hedy Lamarr
• PBS - Amercian Masters - Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
• Famous Scientists - Biography of Hedy Lamarr
• Turner Classic Movies - Hedy Lamarr
• Hedy Lamarr - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Hedy Lamarr (born November 9, 1913/14, Vienna , Austria—died January 19, 2000, near Orlando , Florida , U.S.) was an Austrian-born American film star who was often typecast as a provocative femme fatale . Years after her screen career ended, she achieved recognition as a noted inventor of a radio communications device.

The daughter of a prosperous Viennese banker, 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, 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. Her burgeoning career was halted by her 1933 marriage to Austrian munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl, who not only prohibited her from further stage and screen appearances but also tried unsuccessfully to destroy all existing prints of Extase . After leaving the possessive Mandl, she went to Hollywood in 1937, where she appeared in her first English-language film, the classic romantic drama Algiers (1938). Lamarr became a U.S. citizen in 1953.

Under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1938 to 1945, she displayed her acting skills in such films as H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941) and Tortilla Flat (1942). For the most part, however, she was confined to mostly decorative roles, such as that of Tondelayo in White Cargo (1942). Hoping to secure more substantial parts, she set up her own production company in 1946, but within three years she returned to her exotic stock-in-trade in Cecil B. DeMille ’s Samson and Delilah (1949), her most commercially successful film.

Lamarr once insisted, “Any girl can be glamorous; all you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” That she herself was anything but stupid was unequivocally proved during World War II when, in collaboration with the avant-garde composer George Antheil , she invented an electronic device that minimized the jamming of radio signals. Though it was never used in wartime, this device is a component of present-day satellite and cellular phone technology .

Retiring from movies in 1958 (except for a cameo appearance in Instant Karma , 1990), Lamarr subsequently resurfaced in 1966 and 1991 when she was arrested on, and later cleared of, shoplifting charges; when she sued the collaborators on her 1966 autobiography Ecstasy and Me for misrepresentation; and when she took director Mel Brooks to court for including a character named Hedley Lamarr in his western spoof Blazing Saddles (1974). She was married six times (her husbands included screenwriter Gene Markey and actor John Loder) but was living alone at the time of her death.

Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-American actress and inventor who pioneered the technology that would one day form the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communication systems. As a natural beauty seen widely on the big screen in films like Samson and Delilah and White Cargo , society has long ignored her inventive genius.  

Lamarr was originally Hedwig Eva Kiesler, born in Vienna, Austria on November 9 th , 1914 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. 

Lamarr’s brilliant mind was ignored, and her beauty took center stage when she was discovered by director Max Reinhardt at age 16. She studied acting with Reinhardt in Berlin and was in her first small film role by 1930, in a German film called Geld auf der Stra βe (“Money on the Street”). However, it wasn’t until 1932 that Lamarr gained name recognition as an actress for her role in the controversial film, Ecstasy .

Austrian munitions dealer, Fritz Mandl, became one of Lamarr’s adoring fans when he saw her in the play Sissy . Lamarr and Mandl married in 1933 but it was short-lived. She once said, “I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife … He was the absolute monarch in his marriage … I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own.” She was incredibly unhappy, as she was forced to play host and smile on demand amongst Mandl’s friends and scandalous business partners, some of whom were associated with the Nazi party. She escaped from Mandl’s grasp in 1937 by fleeing to London but took with her the knowledge gained from dinner-table conversation over wartime weaponry.

While in London, Lamarr’s luck took a turn when she was introduced to Louis B. Mayer, of the famed MGM Studios. With this meeting, she secured her ticket to Hollywood where she mystified American audiences with her grace, beauty, and accent. In Hollywood, Lamarr was introduced to a variety of quirky real-life characters, such as businessman and pilot Howard Hughes.

Lamarr dated Hughes but was most notably interested with his desire for innovation. Her scientific mind had been bottled-up by Hollywood but Hughes helped to fuel the innovator in Lamarr, giving her a small set of equipment to use in her trailer on set. While she had an inventing table set up in her house, the small set allowed Lamarr to work on inventions between takes. Hughes took her to his airplane factories, showed her how the planes were built, and introduced her to the scientists behind process. Lamarr was inspired to innovate as Hughes wanted to create faster planes that could be sold to the US military. She bought a book of fish and a book of birds and looked at the fastest of each kind. She combined the fins of the fastest fish and the wings of the fastest bird to sketch a new wing design for Hughes’ planes. Upon showing the design to Hughes, he said to Lamarr, “You’re a genius.”

Lamarr was indeed a genius as the gears in her inventive mind continued to turn. She once said, “Improving things comes naturally to me.” She went on to create an upgraded stoplight and a tablet that dissolved in water to make a soda similar to Coca-Cola. However, her most significant invention was engineered as the United States geared up to enter World War II.

In 1940 Lamarr met George Antheil at a dinner party. Antheil was another quirky yet clever force to be reckoned with. Known for his writing, film scores, and experimental music compositions, he shared the same inventive spirit as Lamarr. She and Antheil talked about a variety of topics but of their greatest concerns was the looming war. Antheil recalled, “Hedy said that she did not feel very comfortable, sitting there in Hollywood and making lots of money when things were in such a state.” After her marriage to Mandl, she had knowledge on munitions and various weaponry that would prove beneficial. And so, Lamarr and Antheil began to tinker with ideas to combat the axis powers.

The two came up with an extraordinary new communication system used with the intention of guiding torpedoes to their targets in war. The system involved the use of “frequency hopping” amongst radio waves, with both transmitter and receiver hopping to new frequencies together. Doing so prevented the interception of the radio waves, thereby allowing the torpedo to find its intended target. After its creation, Lamarr and Antheil sought a patent and military support for the invention. While awarded U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 in August of 1942, the Navy decided against the implementation of the new system. The rejection led Lamarr to instead support the war efforts with her celebrity by selling war bonds. Happy in her adopted country, she became an American citizen in April 1953.

Meanwhile, Lamarr’s patent expired before she ever saw a penny from it. While she continued to accumulate credits in films until 1958, her inventive genius was yet to be recognized by the public. It wasn’t until Lamarr’s later years that she received any awards for her invention. The Electronic Frontier Foundation jointly awarded Lamarr and Antheil with their Pioneer Award in 1997. Lamarr also became the first woman to receive the Invention Convention’s Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award. Although she died in 2000, Lamarr was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the development of her frequency hopping technology in 2014. Such achievement has led Lamarr to be dubbed “the mother of Wi-Fi” and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth.

Bedi, Joyce. “A Movie Star, Some Player Pianos, and Torpedoes.” Smithsonian National Museum of American History: Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, November 12, 2015.

Camhi, Leslie. “Hedy Lamarr’s Forgotten, Frustrated Career as a Wartime Inventor.” The New Yorker , December 3, 2017.

DeFore, John. “'Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story': Film Review | Tribeca 2017.” The Hollywood Reporter , April 25, 2017.

“Hedy Lamarr: Biography.” IMDb.com.

“Hedy Lamarr Biography.” Biography.com. April 2, 2014.

“'Most Beautiful Woman' By Day, Inventor By Night.” All Things Considered , NPR, November 22, 2011.

“Women in Science: How Hedy Lamarr Pioneered Modern Wi-Fi Technology.” TEDxUCLWomen. July 30, 2017.

Y.F.. “The incredible inventiveness of Hedy Lamarr.” The Economist, November 23, 2017.

APA: Cheslak, C. (2018, August 30). Hedy Lamarr. Retrieved from https://www.womenshistory.org/students-and-educators/biographies/hedy-lamarr

MLA: Cheslak, Colleen. “Hedy Lamarr.”  Hedy Lamarr , National Women's History Museum, 30 Aug. 2018, www.womenshistory.org/students-and-educators/biographies/hedy-lamarr.

Chicago:Cheslak, Colleen. "Hedy Lamarr." Hedy Lamarr. August 30, 2018. https://www.womenshistory.org/students-and-educators/biographies/hedy-lamarr.

Rhodes, Richard. Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World . New York: Doubleday, 2011.

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story. Directed by Alexandra Dean. New York: Zeitgeist Films, November 24, 2017.

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Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000)

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IMDbPro Starmeter Top 5,000 880

• 4 wins & 1 nomination

• Jenny Hager

• Princess Veronica

• Dolores Sweets Ramirez

• Vanessa Windsor

• Consuela Bowers

• Joan of Arc

• (scenes deleted)

• Imperatrice Giuseppina
• Genoveffa di Brabante
• Hedy Windsor

• Elana di Troia
• Empress Josephine ...

• Lily Dalbray

• Marianne Lorress

• Lisa Roselle

• Dr. J.O. Loring

• Madeleine Damien
• executive producer

• stand-in: Nancy Kelly (uncredited)

Personal details

• Official Site
• Hedwig Kiesler
• 5′ 7″ (1.70 m)
• November 9 , 1914
• Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now Austria]
• January 19 , 2000
• Casselberry, Florida, USA (natural causes)
• Spouses Lewis William Boies Jr. March 4, 1963 - June 21, 1965 (divorced)
• Children James Lamarr Markey
• Parents Emil Kiesler
• Other works (7/13/42) Radio: Appeared in a "Lux Radio Theater" production of "H.M. Pulham, Esq."
• 3 Biographical Movies
• 9 Print Biographies
• 4 Portrayals
• 17 Articles
• 28 Pictorials
• 18 Magazine Cover Photos

Did you know

• Trivia Inspired by an early Philco wireless radio remote and player piano rolls, she worked with composer George Antheil (who created a symphony played by eight synchronized player pianos) she invented a frequency-hopping system for remotely controlling torpedoes during World War II. (The frequency hopping concept appeared as early as 1903 in a U.S. Patent by Nikola Tesla). The invention was examined superficially and filed away. At the time, Allied torpedoes, as well as those of the Axis powers, were unguided. Input for depth, speed, and direction were made moments before launch but once leaving the submarine the torpedo received no further input. In 1959 it was developed for controlling drones that would later be used in Viet Nam. Frequency hopping radio became a Navy standard by 1960. Due to the expiration of the patent and Lamarr's unawareness of time limits for filing claims, she was never compensated. Her invention is used today for WiFi, Bluetooth, and even top secret military defense satellites. While the current estimate of the value of the invention is approximately $30 billion, during her final years she was getting by on SAG and social security checks totaling only $300 a month.
• Quotes I must quit marrying men who feel inferior to me. Somewhere, there must be a man who could be my husband and not feel inferior. I need a superior inferior man.
• Trademarks Natural brunette hair
• Hollywood's Loveliest Legendary Lady
• Queen of Glamour
• Salaries A Lady Without Passport ( 1950 ) $90,000
• When did Hedy Lamarr die?
• How did Hedy Lamarr die?
• How old was Hedy Lamarr when she died?

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• What Is Cinema?

The Beautiful Brilliance of Hedy Lamarr

“I’ve never been satisfied. I’ve no sooner done one thing than I am seething inside me to do another thing,” Golden Age screen siren Hedy Lamarr once said .

And do things Lamarr did. The stunning star of classics including Algiers and Samson and Delilah was much more than the label she was given, “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Married six times, she was an actress, pioneering female producer, ski-resort impresario , painter, art collector, and groundbreaking inventor, whose important innovations are meticulously cataloged in Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes ’s 2012 book, Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World .

However, it was another book that would alter the course of Lamarr’s life. Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman , ghostwritten by Cy Rice and Leo Guild (who was also ghostwriter of the notorious Barbara Payton tell-all I Am Not Ashamed ), was released in 1966 and immediately became a best seller.

Based on 50 hours of taped conversations with the eccentric, vulnerable Lamarr, Ecstasy and Me is a grotesquely fascinating chronicle of the way women have been sexualized, minimized, and trivialized throughout history. Though it’s classified as an autobiography, the book starts with a male psychologist proclaiming that the sex-positive Lamarr is “blissfully unaffected by moral standards that our contemporary culture declares acceptable,” and goes on nauseatingly from there.

Lurid, amorous encounters right out of a Roger Corman sexploitation film and sexual trauma disguised as titillation are the main foci of this supposed autobiography, though sometimes it breaks, bizarrely, for transcripts of conversations Lamarr recorded with a psychiatrist. Sprinkled in are standard Hollywood gossip—sometimes catty, occasionally kind portraits of everyone from Judy Garland and Clark Gable to Ingrid Bergman—and inane pronouncements such as “Why Americans suspect bidets, I’ll never know. They are the last word in cleanliness.”

In 2010’s definitive Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr , biographer Stephen Michael Shearer writes that those close to Lamarr believed some of the nonsexual stories in Ecstasy and Me were accurate, with Lamarr’s own voice occasionally breaking through the sensationalist muddle. But they also felt the outlandish sexual stories were complete lies. The reader gets the sense that while Lamarr may have said the things she’s quoted as saying, statements made while she might have been high shouldn’t have been taken at face value. It’s no wonder Lamarr would sue unsuccessfully in an attempt to stop the publication of Ecstasy and Me , which she labeled “fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libelous, and obscene.” As she told Merv Griffin in 1969, “That’s not my book.”

Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna, Austria, in 1914, to an assimilated Jewish family . In Hedy’s Folly , Rhodes paints a captivating picture of the artistic, intellectual Vienna of Lamarr’s youth, exploring the forces that would shape her (and making the reader wish they could step back in time). While Lamarr’s cultured mother worried that her extraordinarily beautiful, bright, and headstrong only child would grow spoiled, her father, Emil, a prominent banker, coddled and cultivated his precious daughter. “He made me understand that I must make my own decisions, mold my own character, think my own thoughts,” Lamarr later recalled, per Rhodes.

Ecstasy and Me describes Lamarr’s adolescence as a tumultuous time, filled with the trauma of attempted rape, lurid sexual exploits at boarding school, and an affair with her friend’s father that produced “uncountable” orgasms. It fails to mention, though, that when she was a teenager, she was already learning mechanics, and had become a fearless self-promoter and a protégé of theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt.

Buy Ecstasy and Me on Amazon .

At the age of 17, Lamarr was cast in the film that catapulted her to international stardom and infamy: Ecstasy , the project that gave her purported autobiography its title. The movie includes a scene in which Lamarr (who was unaccompanied by her parents during shooting) swimming nude and simulating an orgasm—a first in film history. Some of the only affecting passages in Ecstasy and Me come when Lamarr describes the exploitation she suffered at the hands of powerful men while making films like these.

Most disturbing are her allegations that Ecstasy director Gustav Machatý resorted to cruel methods to get the teenager’s reactive face during her love scene with costar Aribert Mog: 

Aribert took over me, and the scene began again. Aribert slipped down out of range on one side. From down out of range on the other side, the director jabbed that pin into my buttocks “a little” and I reacted…. I remember one shot when the close-up camera caught my face in a distortion of real agony…and the director yelled happily “Ya, goot!”

In 1933, Lamarr married munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl. “He had the most amazing brain…. There was nothing he did not know…. Ask him a formula in chemistry and he would give it to you,” she said, per Rhodes.

The union was an unhappy one, though Ecstasy and Me conveniently leaves out crucial details about her relationship to make Lamarr appear blameless. That book describes her marriage as a perverse fairy tale. The much older Mandl did not allow her to act; Lamarr soon found that life with him was little more than a prison, a “gilded cage.”

All of Lamarr’s biographers agree that Mandl was insanely controlling and jealous of his wife’s beauty and infamy. Incensed and embarrassed by Lamarr’s nudity in Ecstasy , he spent a large sum of money in an attempt to buy up all existing copies of the film (he failed).

But Lamarr was not entirely as hopeless as she is portrayed in Ecstasy and Me . Shearer writes in Beautiful that while married, Lamarr had an affair with her husband’s best friend, Prince Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg. And according to Rhodes, she was far from the stereotypical trophy wife. Lamarr listened carefully to talk of the German military’s technological innovations as she presided over grand dinners in Starhemberg’s home. One of the most intriguing aspects of Hedy’s Folly is the detailed insight it gives into the big-business world of munitions and armaments, and how it may have influenced Lamarr’s future inventions.

If both Ecstasy and Me and Hedy’s Folly sometimes read more like spy thrillers than nonfiction, it is because what came next for Lamarr was incontestably dramatic. Always a fabulist, Lamarr would tell numerous stories of her attempts to flee Mandl. In Ecstasy and Me, the chosen version is particularly outrageous: that Lamarr hired a maid who looked like her so that she could steal the maid’s identity and sneak out of the house using the servants’ entrance. Lamarr’s son would corroborate this unbelievable story in the excellent, nuanced 2017 documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story .

Whatever the truth, though, she did escape—first to Paris, then to London. By 1937, Lamarr was headed to Hollywood, with a contract from MGM’s Louis B. Mayer. Ecstasy and Me paints the exec as a phony, lecherous ham whom Lamarr constantly outsmarts. One can only hope that is true.

By 1940, the newly christened Hedy Lamarr was a bona fide movie star. Disdainful of the Hollywood social whirl, she preferred painting or swimming with her good friend Ann Sothern. “Any girl can be glamorous,” she later said . “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Ecstasy and Me presents these years as times of endless lovemaking and rehashes tired tropes about movie making. But according to Rhodes, Lamarr’s real passions were her inventions. She spent countless nights tinkering in a corner of her Benedict Canyon mansion, which contained drafting boards and gadgets galore. “My mother was very bright minded,” her son Anthony Loder later told the L.A. Times . “She always had solutions. Anytime someone complained about anything, boom, her mind came up with a solution.”

According to that same paper, while dating Howard Hughes, Lamarr worked on plans to streamline his airplanes. She also invented a bouillon cube that produced cola when dropped in plain water. But her real contribution to science arose out of a chance meeting with the flamboyant avant-garde composer and amateur inventor George Antheil (who is heavily profiled in Hedy’s Folly —so much that it makes the reader wish Rhodes would just get back to Lamarr’s story) at the home of movie star Janet Gaynor.

Antheil would later say that Lamarr was initially interested in his claim that he could make her breasts bigger (bosoms are a preoccupation in Ecstasy and Me as well). But the two soon turned their focus to helping the war effort, and began work on an invention based on Lamarr’s theory of “frequency hopping,” which could stop radio systems from being jammed by the enemy, aiding in torpedo launches. In August 1942, the government issued its “secret communication system,” U.S. patent No. 2,292,387. This system would later be used by the U.S. Navy and would be highly influential.

If Hedy’s Folly is sometimes bogged down by scientific and mechanical details, it is at least an overdue overcorrection. Books like Rhodes’s are a necessary revaluation of historical women’s roles as thinkers and game changers, contrasting the narrative that their lives were guided only by romance, physical appearance, and children. It is almost impossible to believe that in 50 hours of interviews, Lamarr never mentioned inventing—but in Ecstasy and Me , her passion is not mentioned once.

So why did this curious, ingenious woman agree to participate in Ecstasy and Me in the first place? By the mid-1960s, Lamarr’s movie stardom and six tumultuous marriages were firmly in the past. She claimed to be broke, and according to the documentary Bombshell, was addicted to methamphetamines ( she was a patient of Max Jacobson, the notorious “ Dr. Feelgood ”). In 1966, Lamarr was arrested at the May Company department store in Los Angeles for allegedly stealing items including two strings of beads, a lipstick brush, and an eye makeup brush. She was later acquitted .

According to Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr , Lamarr received a total of $80,000 for Ecstasy and Me . She signed off on the manuscript without reading it, legally paving the way for its publication.

It was a grave error. The book’s torrid passages are written like classic pornography; they include tales of orgies on sets with starlets and assistant directors, sadomasochism, and a strange story of one lover who had sex with a doll that he had made to look like Lamarr while she watched in horror.

It also includes a few interesting passages discussing her role as a groundbreaking film producer, and defensive yet amusing retellings of her bizarre behavior during her divorce from millionare Texas oilman W. Howard Lee (she sent her stand-in to testify for her in court). But the sex is was what stuck.

Once Lamarr actually bothered to read Ecstasy and Me , she knew her career was done. “I was there when she read Ecstasy and Me for the first time,” TCM’s Robert Osborne recalls in Beautiful . “She was shocked by it. But that was the foolish side of her. She wanted money. They simply made up passages in that book and she allowed them to…. It was part of her capriciousness, giving away parts of her life for a book and not worrying about the consequences.”

Although presiding judge Ralph H. Nutter believed Ecstasy and Me was “filthy, nauseating, and revolting,” he ruled against Lamarr, and the book was published anyway. “The damage it did to Hedy’s career and reputation was irreversible,” Shearer writes in Beautiful . Reading it, one instantly understands why. The cool Austrian film goddess had been knocked off her pedestal, presenting herself (intentionally or not) as a self-professed “nymphomaniac” and an irrational, self-obsessed has-been who bemoans the curse of her great beauty one too many times.

Lamarr eventually moved to Florida. Unable to cope with aging, she became a recluse, obsessed with plastic surgery and pushing her doctors to innovate new techniques in the field. “Hedy retreated from the gazes of those who didn’t look deeper. She…filled her days with activities (and lawsuits) and, with the humor still intact, tolerated the rest of us,” Osborne writes in the forward to Beautiful .

Lamarr rarely saw her children or friends, but instead talked to them on the telephone for hours every day. She also claimed she was writing her autobiography, seemingly trying to erase the pain and embarrassment of Ecstasy and Me from her memory.

As Lamarr hid away, her wartime work in frequency hopping was becoming extremely important. It paved the way for Wi-Fi, cellular technology, and modern satellite systems. Lamarr was aware of these uses, and bitter that her work had not been recognized—nor had she received a cent for her contributions. “I can’t understand why there’s no acknowledgment when it’s used all over the world,” she said in an influential 1990 Forbes interview , which slowly began to wake the world up to her accomplishments.

In 1997, three years before her death, Lamarr was finally honored with the prestigious Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. When she heard of the award, she said to her son simply this: “It’s about time.”

Perhaps it is fitting that it has been so hard to tell Lamarr’s entire story until recently; an extraordinarily beautiful, troubled, brilliant, sexually liberated woman has long been too much for patriarchal society to handle. This is something Lamarr seemed to understand. In a 1969 interview, she explained it to a befuddled Merv Griffin: “I’m a very simple, complicated person.”

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Hadley Hall Meares

Hedy Lamarr

Golden Age Film Actress and Inventor of Frequency-Hopping Technology

 Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

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Hedy Lamarr was a film actress of Jewish heritage during MGM ’s “Golden Age.” Deemed “the most beautiful woman in the world” by MGM publicists, Lamarr shared the silver screen with stars like Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. Yet Lamarr was much more than a pretty face, she also is credited with inventing frequency-hopping technology.

Early Life and Career

Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on November 9, 1914, in Vienna, Austria. Her parents were Jewish, with her mother, Gertrud (née Lichtwitz) being a pianist (rumored to have converted to Catholicism ) and her father Emil Kiesler, a successful banker. Lamarr’s father loved technology and would explain how everything from streetcars to printing presses worked. His influence no doubt led to Lamarr’s own enthusiasm for technology later in life.

As a teen Lamarr became interested in acting and in 1933 she starred in a film titled " Ecstasy ." She played a young wife, named Eva, who is trapped in a loveless marriage to an older man and who eventually begins an affair with a young engineer. The film generated controversy because it included scenes that would be tame by modern standards: a glance of Eva’s breasts, a shot of her running naked through the forest, and an up close shot of her face during a love scene.

Also in 1933, Lamarr married a wealthy, Vienna-based arms manufacturer named Friedrich Mandl. Their marriage was an unhappy one, with Lamarr reporting in her autobiography that Mandl was extremely possessive and isolated Lamarr from other people. She would later remark that during their marriage she was given every luxury except freedom. Lamarr despised their life together and after attempting to leave him in 1936, fled to France in 1937 disguised as one of her maids.

The Most Beautiful Woman in the World

From France, she went on to London, where she met Louis B. Mayer, who offered her an acting contract  in the United States.

Before long, Mayer convinced her to change her name from Hedwig Kiesler to Hedy Lamarr, inspired by a silent film actress who had died in 1926. Hedy signed a contract with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio, which dubbed her “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World." Her first American film, Algiers , was a box office hit.

Lamarr went on to make many other films with Hollywood stars such as Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy ( Boom Town ) and Victor Mature ( Samson and Delilah ). During this period, she married screenwriter Gene Markey, though their relationship ended in divorce in 1941.

Lamarr would eventually have six husbands in all. After Mandl and Markey, she married John Lodger (1943-47, actor), Ernest Stauffer (1951-52, restaurateur), W. Howard Lee (1953-1960, Texas oilman), and Lewis J. Boies (1963-1965, lawyer). Lamarr had two children with her third husband, John Lodger: a daughter named Denise and a son named Anthony. Hedy kept her Jewish heritage a secret throughout her life. In fact, it was only after her death that her children learned they were Jewish.

The Invention of Frequency Hopping

One of Lamarr’s greatest regrets was that people rarely recognized her intelligence. “Any girl can be glamorous,” she once said. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."

Lamarr was a naturally gifted mathematician and during her marriage to Mandl had become familiar with concepts related to military technology. This background came to the forefront in 1941 when Lamarr came up with the concept of frequency hopping. In the midst of World War II , radio-guided torpedoes did not have a high success rate when it came to hitting their targets. Lamarr thought frequency hopping would make it harder for enemies to detect a torpedo or intercept its signal. She shared her idea with a composer named George Antheil (who at one time had been a government inspector of U.S. munitions and who had already composed music that used the remote control of automated instruments), and together they submitted her idea to the U.S. Patent Office. The patent was filed in 1942 and published in 1942 under H.K. Markey et. al.

Though Lamarr's concept would ultimately revolutionize technology, at the time the military did not want to accept military advice from a Hollywood starlet. As a result, her idea was not put into practice until the 1960s after her patent had expired. Today, Lamarr’s concept is the basis of spread-spectrum technology, which is used for everything from Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to satellites and wireless phones.

Later Life and Death

Lamarr’s film career began to slow in the 1950s. Her last movie was The Female Animal with Jane Powell. In 1966, she published an autobiography titled Ecstasy and Me,  which went on to become a best seller. She also received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In the early 1980s, Lamarr moved to Florida where she died, largely a recluse, of heart disease on January 19, 2000, at the age of 86. She was cremated and her ashes were scattered in the Vienna Woods.

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Hedy Lamarr: The Hollywood Star Who Helped Invent WiFi

Lucy Davidson

24 feb 2022, @lucejuiceluce.

Austrian-American Hollywood icon Hedy Lamarr was most well-known for her glittering acting career. Appearing in films like Samson and Delilah and White Cargo, the starlet was known for her captivating performances and sublime beauty – her appearance inspired the characters Snow White and Catwoman – and graced cinema screens around the world in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.

However, lesser-known are her extraordinary inventions in the realms of science and military weaponry, with her ‘frequency hopping’ radio mechanism later paving the way for ubiquitous technology we enjoy today such as WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth.

Though overlooked by fans of her acting career, Hedy Lamarr’s inventions won her numerous awards in her lifetime, including one described as being on par with an Oscar. She has since been nicknamed the ‘Mother of WiFi’.

Here’s the extraordinary life of actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr.

Her father inspired her love of machines and inventions

Hedwig Eva Kiesler, known as Hedy Lamarr, was born in Vienna in 1914 to a prosperous Jewish family. As an only child, Hedy spent extensive time with her father. Together, they discussed the inner workings of machines such as the printing press and cars, and at 5 years old Hedy could be found dismantling her toy music box to understand how it worked.

Publicity photo of Hedy Lamarr for film Comrade X, 1940.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Her mother was a concert pianist, so signed Lamarr up for ballet and music lessons. At this time she also began to show an interest in acting and was fascinated by film and theatre, and aged 16 applied to and attended Max Reinhardt’s Berlin-based drama school.

Within a year she had made her cinema debut. However, it was through the Czech film Extase ( Ecstasy , 1932) that shot her to stardom. Endless famous films followed until Lamarr’s retirement in 1958. In 1960, she was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

An unhappy marriage gave her an insight into weaponry

In 1933, just as Lamarr’s career was taking off, she married Austrian munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl who had fallen in love with her after seeing her performing. He immediately prohibited her from any more stage or screen appearances and attempted to destroy all copies of  Ecstasy.

Describing Mandl as an “absolute monarch in his marriage… I was a doll… having no mind, no life of its own”, Lamarr was forced to play host amongst her husband’s friends, some of whom were members of the Nazi party . In 1937 she managed to escape by fleeing to London. In spite of her abusive marriage, Lamarr’s various dinner-party conversations with her husband and his friends had taught her crucial information about wartime weaponry.

She developed her passion for inventing alongside others

Lobby card for the 1940 film Comrade X with Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr.

In London, Lamarr met and started dating businessman and pilot Howard Hughes, who fascinated her in part because of his desire for innovation. Hughes encouraged Lamarr’s inventive talents, giving her a small set of equipment to use in her trailer on set which she would use to work on inventions between takes.

Hughes, who wanted to create faster planes to sell to the US military, brought Lamarr to his aeroplane factories to teach her how they were built and introduce her to other scientific minds. In response, Lamarr studied a book of fish and birds to sketch a new design for Hughes’ planes. He reportedly stated that she was a ‘genius’ for the designs that she produced.

Though little is known about their specific inventions, Lamarr later dedicated more time to her inventing and partnered with eccentric composer George Antheil. Another inventor, Carmelo ‘Nino’ Amarena, recalled speaking to Lamarr, and stated that, “we talked like two engineers on a hot project… I never felt I was talking to a movie star, but to a fellow inventor.”

Lamarr made her invention breakthrough during World War Two

Lamarr made a huge breakthrough in the early years of World War Two when attempting to invent a device to block enemy ships from jamming torpedo guidance signals. She pioneered a way for radio guidance transmitters and torpedo receivers to simultaneously jump from one frequency to another, which made it impossible for the enemy to block a message before it had moved to a different frequency. This was known as ‘frequency hopping’.

The first model was built by George Antheil. However, he confirmed that it was Lamarr’s design, and the pair patented their invention. When they offered it to the US Navy, it was rejected by engineers. However, during the mid-1950s, the Navy shared Lamarr’s invention with a contractor assigned to create sonobuoys, which could be dropped into water to detect submarines.

The use of their technology was later adopted during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 , with all US ships on a blockade line around Cuba being armed with torpedoes guided by the frequency hopping mechanism.

She never received royalties for her invention

Lamarr never made a penny from any of her inventions throughout her life. Indeed, though the patent for their frequency hopping technology didn’t expire until 1959, Lamarr and Antheil never received compensation for the use of their concept, which is estimated to be worth $30 billion today.

Hedy Lamarr and her new husband Gene Markey, March 1939.

Lamarr retired from Hollywood in 1958 and became reclusive as time went on, in part because of 5 further marriages and divorces. However, the wide-ranging value and impact of her inventions slowly began to be recognised within her lifetime.

In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil were awarded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Pioneer Award, and later the same year, Lamarr became the first woman to receive the BULBIE™ Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, which is so prestigious that it is considered to be the ‘Oscar of inventing’.

Lamarr died at home in Florida aged 85. 14 years later, she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and today, she is remembered not only for her glittering career on screen but also for her extraordinary contributions to technology that is used across the world.

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Remembering Hedy Lamarr: Actress, Weapons Systems Developer

Renaissance woman Hedy Lamarr was born on this day 100 years ago. Not only was she a major screen actress, she was also an inventor. NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates speaks with Lamarr biographer Richard Rhodes.

Copyright © 2014 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Hedy Lamarr: The Hollywood starlet who helped invent WiFi

An aspiring actress from Austria, who escaped her Nazi arms dealer husband and escaped to fame and fortune in Hollywood, she married five times and in her spare time was a self-taught scientist and pioneer in the field of wireless communication whose inventions would influence the development of GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth...to say the life of Hedy Lamarr was eventful would be a seismic understatement.

Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. As a young girl, she became fascinated with theatre and film and soon began taking acting classes in Vienna. It didn’t take long before she landed her first major role in a play when Austrian theatrical producer Max Reinhardt cast her in The Weaker Sex.

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Film offers followed shortly after and in early 1933, 18-year-old Lamarr landed the lead role in a Czech movie that would make her internationally famous. The film was a highly controversial romantic drama called Ecstasy. Not only was Lamarr shown nude but she also acted in a scene that included the first non-pornographic portrayal of sex in a film, as well as the first on-screen depiction of a female orgasm.

Although nothing more than the actors’ faces were shown, Pope Pius XII denounced the film, Hitler banned it and America gave it a limited run years later. However, many considered Ecstasy a great piece of artistic work and subsequently the film gained worldwide recognition. Lamarr had made a name for herself.

During that same year, Lamarr met her first husband, a wealthy 33-year-old Austrian arms dealer and manufacturer called Friedrich Mandl. Lamarr’s parents, both of Jewish descent, disapproved of the union mainly due to Mandl’s strong fascist views and ties with Mussolini and Hitler, both of whom were reported to have attended parties hosted by Mandl.

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Lamarr would later describe Mandl as overtly controlling and possessive, who effectively kept her prisoner in her own home. Not only did he prevent her from acting but reportedly spent a small fortune trying to purchase every existing copy of Ecstasy in an unsuccessful attempt to suppress it.

In the end, Lamarr supposedly drugged her maid with sleeping pills before stealing her outfit, lining the insides of it with jewellery and then fleeing on the maid’s bicycle.

Lamarr fled to Paris before moving onto London in 1937. There she managed to arrange a meeting with Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, who happened to be in London for business. Meyer was unsure at first that Lamarr could make it in the States after the shockwaves of Ecstasy were still being felt. Ever the sucker for a glamorous lady, Meyer did eventually offer Lamarr a six-month-contract of $125 a week. Believing she was worth far more than that, Lamarr turned the offer down.

Her features were so striking they were said to have inspired Walt Disney’s Snow White character created that year.

Soon after though she regretted the decision and managed to find her way on board the exact same liner as Meyer as he travelled back to America. Donning all the jewellery she had managed to smuggle away with her, Lamarr had convinced Meyer by the end of the voyage to offer her a seven-year-contract at $500 a week. On one condition that she change her name in order to distance herself from her Ecstasy reputation. Hedy Kiesler was now Hedy Lamarr, named in honour of the famous silent film star Barbara La Marr.

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A short while later Lamarr arrived in Hollywood and was soon being touted as the ‘world’s most beautiful woman.’ Her features were so striking they were said to have inspired Walt Disney’s Snow White character created that year.

Lamarr’s first Hollywood movie was Algiers (1938), where she played the role of a glamorous seductress. Audiences were bowled over…‘everyone gasped ... Lamarr's beauty literally took one's breath away.’ A star was born, although Algiers had invariably typecast her for future films.

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Lady of the Tropics (1939) followed next, where again Lamarr played a beautiful glamorous seductress of exotic origin, a nod to her European heritage. Boom Town with Clark Cable came in 1940, Come Live With Me with James Stewart and Ziegfield Girl with Judy Garland in 1941. One of her most successful films was White Cargo (1942) although again she was flaunted around and given very few lines. Lamarr was considered for the lead role in Casablanca (1943) and Gaslight (1944) but missed out on both.

Her last film under her MGM contract came in 1945, after which she left MGM and set up her own production company, becoming one of the first female producers in Hollywood.

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When Cecile B. DeMille cast her as the ultimate femme fatale, Delilah, in his film Samson and Delilah in 1949, Lamarr was no longer the Hollywood A-lister she once was. The film was however to be Lamarr’s greatest box-office success and potentially the springboard to re-launching her career.

Sadly it was not meant to be and her follow-up movies didn’t fare so well. Lamarr’s career went into decline and her final film appearance came in 1958. Up to this point, her life had already been a rollercoaster ride and in retirement, the ride continued to show no signs of coming to an end.

By 1966 she’d been a regular in the tabloids, fuelled by the divorce of her sixth and last husband and recent arrest for shoplifting, although the charges were dropped. A scandalous memoir of her life, entitled Ecstasy and Me, was also published that year in which the lurid details of her sex life had been written down for all to see. Lamarr would go on to claim that her ghostwriter fabricated most of the contents of the book. She went on to unsuccessfully sue the publishers.

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Litigation was again a theme in the 70s. She filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Warner Bros. for using her name without permission as a running gag in the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles (1974). Although accounts differ, she apparently settled out of court for an undisclosed fee.

By this time Lamarr had also developed a crippling drug addiction, aided by the infamous Dr. Feelgood, aka Max Jacobsen, who notoriously gave many celebrities, including JFK , regular ‘miracle shots’, which were mostly made up of amphetamines and animal hormones. Lamarr had also become somewhat addicted to plastic surgery, becoming a victim of her era’s ageist attitudes. She would often make suggestions to her surgeons to improve techniques, with many of her ideas becoming common methods of plastic surgery in the future.

By the 80s Lamarr had settled in Florida and withdrawn from the public eye. In 1991 she was again arrested for shoplifting, supposedly trying to take around $20 worth of eye drops and laxatives from a pharmacy. Again, no charges were filed.

Her remaining years were spent in seclusion, often only communicating with those on the outside, including her family and children, via the telephone. On January 19 2000, Lamarr passed away of heart disease. She was 85.

'Inventions are easy for me to do. I don’t have to work on ideas. They come naturally.'

Upon her death the world remembered her as one of the sirens of the silver screen, a famed beauty who had possessed a scandalous love life. Her showbiz legacy forever immortalised with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And yet, her story didn’t end there.

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In recent years her legacy has been transformed and she’s now remembered more for her brains than for her looks. Lamarr was a great inventor; it was her passion and her pastime. In between shoots, she would retire to her trailer and tinker with her inventions.

A well-received 2017 documentary entitled Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, written and directed by Alexandra Dean and co-produced by Susan Sarandon, helped to shine a light on this side of Lamarr’s story. The film includes audio recordings of Lamarr talking about her life, at one point she says, ‘Inventions are easy for me to do. I don’t have to work on ideas. They come naturally.’ She was a very gifted scientist and on top of that she was completely self-taught.

There were some who knew of Lamarr’s talents, including the eccentric aviation inventor Howard Hughes , a one-time flame of Lamarr’s. He did everything he could to support her hobby, providing her with the materials to carry out her ideas. He not only recognised her skills but also came to depend on them.

Lamarr helped Hughes find a way to make his planes fly faster. She believed his current wing designs were too square, so she brought a couple books, one about birds and one about fish. She studied their anatomies and concluded that the wing shapes on Hughes’ planes needed to be more streamlined to help reduce drag. Hughes declared her a genius.

The true extent of Lamarr’s scientific talent was shown, although not fully appreciated, during the war. When Lamarr heard that 80 children had been killed after a German U-boat sank a passenger ship crossing the Atlantic, she became desperate to help the Allied cause. It didn’t take long for her to discover just how she was going to do that.

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In 1940, she teamed up with her composer friend, George Antheil, and started working on a ‘secret communication system’ intended for use by the US Navy. This system used a ‘frequency hopping’ technology to make it difficult for the enemy, especially U-boats, to detect or jam any incoming radio-controlled torpedoes fired from US ships. Using a piano roll to change among 88 different frequencies, this novel approach was truly unique.

Their invention was granted a patent in 1942 and their designs submitted to the Navy. Although the Navy recognised its potential, the technology wouldn’t be implemented for a further decade.

My face has been my misfortune…It has brought me tragedy and heartache for five decades.

When Lamarr tried to join the National Inventors Council in Washington, a government organisation created in 1940 to help bring potential military inventions to the attention of the US armed forces, she was instead advised by the NIC that if she really wanted to make a difference with the war, she should use her looks to help sell war bonds and entertain troops. The misogyny of the time meant people were unwilling to see her for anything more than a beautiful face. Her beauty had become her curse. She would later remake that, ‘My face has been my misfortune…It has brought me tragedy and heartache for five decades. My face is a mask I cannot remove: I must always live with it. I curse it.'

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The Navy returned to her idea in the 50s, using it to help transmit the underwater positions of enemy submarines revealed by sonar. By the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the technology had been fully embraced by the military. Her invention would go to become the foundation for secure telecommunications and would be used in the development of GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth. Our modern world would not function as it does without Lamarr’s invention.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement and the Harvey Weinstein scandal, Lamarr’s story couldn’t be more relevant. As Bombshell Director Alexandra Dean states , ‘Her story is the foundation of what’s going on. You have to understand how Hollywood was constructed and what that experience was like for a woman like Hedy, who had the full deck of cards – the brilliance, the beauty and how she struggled within that system because there was so much power in the hands of so few men who dictated everything. That’s the backdrop for what we’re talking about today.’

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Siren And Scientist: The Untold Story Of Hollywood Sex Symbol Hedy Lamarr

Hedy lamarr was known in hollywood as "the most beautiful woman in the world," and she also invented the technology that ultimately led to wifi..

A stunning Austrian-born actress, Hedy Lamarr dropped jaws wherever she went and took Old Hollywood by storm. But Lamarr was more than just the “most beautiful girl in the world,” as one film director raved.

Beneath Lamarr’s jet-black bob was a mind of science. Curious, questioning, and insightful, the actress used her oft-ignored intelligence to dream up new technology. In fact, she’s even been credited as the “Mother of WiFi.”

Public Domain Hedy Lamarr became famous for her acting, but that was far from her only talent.

This is the story of Hedy Lamarr, the Hollywood sex symbol whose dramatic life nearly obscured her needle-sharp intelligence.

The Early Years Of Hedy Lamarr

Donaldson Collection/Getty Images Hedy Lamarr in the 1933 film Ekstase , or Ecstasy , where she appeared nude.

Born Hedwig Kiesler on November 9, 1914, Hedy Lamarr spent her early years in Vienna, Austria, as the glamorous belle époque faded into the bloody years of World War I. The daughter of a successful banker father and a concert pianist mother, Lamarr showed high intelligence from a young age.

Encouraged by her father Emil, who often talked to his only child about the inner workings of machines, such as the printing press, Lamarr took apart her music box at the age of five just to see how it worked. She also had an ear for language and could speak four languages by the age of 10.

But the first thing most people noticed about Hedy Lamarr was her good looks. At 16, she caught the eye of film director Max Reinhardt, who raved that her beauty was unparalleled in Europe — and maybe even the world.

From there, Lamarr’s life took a turn. Instead of taking apart more music boxes, she studied acting in Reinhardt’s Berlin-based drama school and won a role in a 1930 film called Geld auf der Straβe (“Money on the Street”).

This modest early success led to a 1933 film that would shock the world — Ekstase , or Ecstasy . In the movie, 18-year-old Hedy Lamarr played the controversial character of Eva, a new bride disappointed by her husband’s lack of sexual appetite. In a series of scandalous scenes that show Lamarr in the nude and portraying an orgasm, Eva falls into the arms of her lover.

According to the New York Times , “Pope Pius XI denounced it, but Mussolini issued a permit so that it could be shown at the Venice Film Festival. It won no awards there but attracted attentive audiences, most of them men.”

Contemporary reviews called the film “indecent and morally dangerous,” “unsuitable, immoral, and lascivious,” and “extremely audacious.” By the time it was shown in the United States seven years later, it appeared in only a handful of theaters and without the approval of the moralistic Hays Code .

For better or for worse, Hedy Lamarr would soon become known as the “Ecstasy Girl.” But her arc toward stardom was just beginning.

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Public Domain Hedy Lamarr, far right, in a publicity still for Algiers (1938).

As Hedy Lamarr’s momentum began to build, she caught the eye of another up-and-coming Austrian: Friedrich Mandl, an arms dealer. After seeing Lamarr in the play Sissy , Mandl wooed her and the pair married in 1933.

But Lamarr — much like her character Eva — found herself trapped in an unhappy and unsatisfying marriage. Mandl forbade Lamarr from acting, tried to destroy every existing copy of Ecstasy , and relegated his bright and talented wife to the role of a hostess who entertained his friends.

“I was like a doll,” Lamarr remembered, calling Mandl a “monarch” in their marriage. “I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded — and imprisoned — having no mind, no life of its own.”

Tired of spending her nights catering to Mandl and his friends — many of whom were Nazis, to the chagrin of the Jewish-born actress — Lamarr plotted her escape. In 1937, she fled her marriage and moved to London.

There, she fatefully crossed paths with Louis B. Mayer, who’d co-founded Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM) in 1924. Though Mayer had his doubts about the “Ecstasy Girl,” Lamarr slyly booked a ticket on the same ship as him and managed to change his mind during their transatlantic crossing.

Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images Hedy Lamarr, pictured during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

She emerged from the voyage transformed. No longer was the young actress Hedwig Kiesler. She would now be known as Hedy Lamarr — a name that was an homage to the silent film star Barbara La Marr. (It was also Mayer’s best attempt to distance his new actress from her scandalous past.)

Lamarr instantly made a big splash in Hollywood. After the success of her first American film Algiers (1938), Lamarr starred in Lady of the Tropics (1939), Boom Town (1940) — in which she appeared alongside Clark Gable and Spencer Tracey — White Cargo (1942), and Samson and Delilah (1949).

But Lamarr had never forgotten the joys of dissecting a music box. “The brains of people are more interesting than the looks, I think,” she mused.

And as storm clouds gathered in Europe, Hedy Lamarr began to think of how she could use her mind — and not her body — to help during World War II.

How The Mind Of Hedy Lamarr Went To Work

Wikimedia Commons Hedy Lamarr filed a patent for technology that would pave the way for WiFi, but the U.S. military did not use it.

Hedy Lamarr kept her curiosity alive in Hollywood. An actress by day, she made small inventions by night, including a new kind of traffic light and a fizzy tablet to make soda. And when Lamarr dated the innovative businessman Howard Hughes, she took a deep dive into these interests.

Unlike other men in Hollywood, Hughes was supportive of her hobbies and once even called her a “genius.” And her greatest invention came in 1940.

Then, during a dinner party, Lamarr struck up a conversation with inventor George Antheil about the war spreading in Europe. “Hedy said that she did not feel very comfortable, sitting there in Hollywood and making lots of money when things were in such a state,” Antheil remembered.

As Lamarr thought back to the boring dinners she’d hosted with her ex-husband Mandl and his Nazi friends, she and Antheil began to tinker with an idea. They came up with something called “frequency hopping.”

Frequency hopping involved changing the frequency between a plane and a guided torpedo so that the enemy couldn’t jam the radio signals. Because the signals kept changing, they would be impossible to predict.

Though Lamarr and Antheil earned a patent for their invention in 1942, the U.S. Navy decided not to adopt frequency hopping. Lamarr ended up lending her celebrity power, and not her genius, to support the war effort.

But luckily, Hedy Lamarr’s hard work didn’t completely go to waste. The bones of her idea would later be used to develop modern-day WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS technologies. And Lamarr would one day be recognized as the “Mother of WiFi” — but that didn’t happen for decades.

Hedy Lamarr’s Later Life And Legacy

Everett Collection/PBS.org Hedy Lamarr leaving the Sybil Brand Institution for Women on bail after being arrested for shoplifting in 1966.

Sadly, the brilliance of Hedy Lamarr’s mind was frequently diminished by her personal drama. Her six marriages provided plenty of tabloid fodder, as did her controversial autobiography, Ecstasy and Me . And her arrests for shoplifting in 1966 and 1991 would put her in the spotlight yet again.

By the time Lamarr died in her Florida home in 2000, she had a strained relationship with her legacy as a famous screen siren. Her beautiful face, she wrote, “brought me tragedy and heartache for five decades. My face is a mask I cannot remove: I must always live with it. I curse it.”

Many details about her final years remain a mystery, as she infamously became a recluse in Casselberry, Florida, and rarely ventured out into public. What is known is that she died on January 19, 2000, at age 85. Hedy Lamarr’s cause of death was later revealed to have been heart disease.

But even though Hedy Lamarr’s star faded before her death, her genius mind and the causes that she was so passionate about were never forgotten. In the 1960s, her frequency-hopping technology was applied during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In later decades, it irrevocably changed the world by birthing technology that we depend on today, like WiFi and Bluetooth.

And as time marched on, Lamarr was finally seen for who she was. In 1997, the Electronic Frontier Foundation awarded Lamarr and Antheil their Pioneer Award. That same year, the “Oscars of Inventing,” the Invention Convention, awarded her the BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award. And in 2014, Lamarr was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Throughout her life, Hedy Lamarr had played many roles. But one role captured her in a prescient way, even though it was likely by accident.

In the 1941 movie Ziegfeld Girl , Lamarr portrays a glamorous woman who wears a shimmering headdress of stars. But as dazzling as they are, their shine can’t compare to the mind of the woman herself.

After reading about Hedy Lamarr, check out these vintage photos that capture Old Hollywood in its heyday. Then, take a look at some of the most shocking Old Hollywood scandals that reveal Tinseltown’s ugly side.

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Hedy Lamarr Biography

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Austrian-born American actress Hedy Lamarr (1913–2000) was among the leading screen sirens of Hollywood in the 1940s. Her life was an eventful one that involved six marriages, a groundbreaking electronic invention, and several cinematic milestones.

Born to Bank Director and Pianist

Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna, Austria, on November 9, 1913. Her family was Jewish and well off; her father was a Bank of Vienna director and her mother a concert pianist. Lamarr attended schools in Vienna and was sent to a finishing school in Switzerland as a teenager. By that time she was already unusually beautiful, attracting the attention of both prospective lovers and film producers. After an unsuccessful audition with famed stage director, Max Reinhardt, from whom she had taken acting lessons, Lamarr moved into films. Her screen career began in 1930 with a pair of Austrian films, Money on the Street and Storm in a Waterglass .

She had several other small roles in German-language films, but it took controversy to put Lamarr on the cinematic map. In 1932 she made a film called Extase (or Ecstasy) in Czechoslovakia; it was released the following year. The film told the simple story of a young woman whose husband is impotent, causing her to seek out the companionship of a younger man. Two scenes were responsible for the film's notoriety and quick banning by Austrian censors: one in which Lamarr runs nude through a sunlit forest, the other a sex scene in which she seems to experience orgasm (her intense facial expressions actually resulted from the application of a safety pin to her buttock by director Gustav Machaty). Lamarr later said that she had been a naive young woman pressured into doing these scenes, but cameraman Jan Stallich told Jan Christopher Horak of CineAction that "as the star of the picture, she knew she would have to appear naked in some scenes. She never made any fuss about it during the production."

Controversy and condemnation from Pope Pius XI temporarily halted Lamarr's film career, but Extase did attract the attention of millionaire Austrian arms dealer Fritz Mandl, whom Lamarr met in December of 1933 and then married. Mandl had converted from Judaism to Catholicism in order to be able to do business with Germany's fascist regime (he was nevertheless exiled to Argentina after Austria came under German control in 1938), and Lamarr also made her religious conversion in 1933. An often-repeated story holds that Mandl tried to buy and destroy every outstanding copy of Extase , but this is thought to be legend rather than fact. Whether out of revulsion toward her husband's politics or from sheer restlessness, Lamarr packed a single suitcase with jewelry, drugged her maid, and fled to Paris and then London in 1937. That September she sailed for New York.

On board, she began negotiating with producer Louis B. Mayer of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M-G-M) studio, who had signed Swedish actress Greta Garbo several years earlier and was on the lookout for exotic European talent. Lamarr had refused Mayer's contract offer in London, but by the time the ship docked in New York she had a $500-a-week contract and the new name of Hedy Lamarr—up to that point she had used Hedi Kiesler. Mayer devised the name, inspired by that of silent film actress Barbara La Marr.

Starred Opposite Charles Boyer

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 (Boyer). 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 (Clark Gable).

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 (the title ostensibly referred to astronomy), 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 .

Lamarr had plenty of space in celebrity gossip columns to go with her screen stardom. She dated silent comedian Charlie Chaplin in 1941, and had flings with Burgess Meredith and several other actors. Lamarr married producer Gene Markey in 1939, divorcing him the following year. For four years she was married to English actor John Loder and had two children by him. Later in life Lamarr was married three more times, to bandleader Teddy Stauffer, Texas oil magnate Howard Lee, and lawyer Lewis Boles. All her marriages ended in divorce. Another man with whom Lamarr may have been romantically involved was composer George Antheil.

Antheil played an important role in Lamarr's life in another way as well—as a collaborator on an important electronics innovation. Lamarr was slightly dismissive of her glamorous image, saying (according to her U.S. News & World Report obituary), "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. At that time, electronic data broadcast on a specific frequency could easily be jammed by enemy transmitters. Lamarr suggested rapid changes in the broadcast frequency, and Antheil, who had experimented with electronic musical instruments, devised a punch-card-like device, similar to a player-piano roll, that could synchronize a transmitter and receiver. The system Lamarr and Antheil invented relied on using 88 frequencies, equivalent to the number of keys on a piano.

Realized No Money from Invention

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 (according to Thomson), that the book was "fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libelous, and obscene."

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. On January 19, 2000, Hedy Lamarr died at her home in Orlando.

Lamarr, Hedy, Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman , Fawcett, 1967.

World of Invention , 2nd ed., Gale, 1999.

Young, Christopher, The Films of Hedy Lamarr , Citadel, 1978.

Periodicals

CineAction , Spring 2001.

Economist , June 21, 2003.

Entertainment Weekly , February 4, 2000.

Forbes , May 14, 1990.

Independent on Sunday (London, England), January 30, 2005.

People , February 7, 2000.

U.S. News & World Report , January 31, 2000.

"Hedy Lamarr," All Movie Guide , http://www.allmovie.com (January 20, 2007).

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How Hollywood Star Hedy Lamarr Invented the Tech Behind WiFi

By: Dave Roos

Published: March 5, 2024

In the 1940s, few Hollywood actresses were more famous and more famously beautiful than Hedy Lamarr. Yet despite starring in dozens of films and gracing the cover of every Hollywood celebrity magazine, few people knew Hedy was also a gifted inventor. In fact, one of the technologies she co-invented laid a key foundation for future communication systems, including GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi.

“Hedy always felt that people didn't appreciate her for her intelligence—that her beauty got in the way,” says Richard Rhodes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who wrote a biography about Hedy.  

After working 12- or 15-hour days at MGM Studios, Hedy would often skip the Hollywood parties or carousing with one of her many suitors and instead sit down at her “inventing table.”

“Hedy had a drafting table and a whole wall full of engineering books. It was a serious hobby,” says Rhodes, author of Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World .

While not a trained engineer or mathematician, Hedy Lamarr was an ingenious problem-solver. Most of her inventions were practical solutions to everyday problems, like a tissue box attachment for depositing used tissues or a glow-in-the-dark dog collar.

It was during World War II , that she developed “frequency hopping,” an invention that’s now recognized as a fundamental technology for secure communications. She didn’t receive credit for the innovation until very late in life.

Hedy Lamarr's Childhood in Austria

Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Kiesler in Vienna, Austria in 1914. She was the only child of a wealthy secular Jewish family. From her father, a bank director, and her mother, a concert pianist, Hedy received a debutante’s education—ballet classes, piano lessons and equestrian training.

There were signs at a young age that Hedy had an engineer’s natural curiosity. On long walks through the bustling streets of Vienna, Hedy’s father would explain how the streetcars worked and how their electricity was generated at the power plant. At five years old, Hedy took apart a music box and reassembled it piece by piece.

“Hedy did not grow up with any technical education, but she did have this personal connection,” says Rhodes. “She loved her father dearly, so it’s easy to see how from that she might have developed an interest in the subject. And also it prepared her to be what she really was, a kind of amateur inventor.”

Hedy's Movie Debut as Teen

Even if Hedy had wanted to be a professional engineer or scientist, that career path wasn’t available to Viennese girls in the 1930s. Instead, teenage Hedy set her sights on the movie industry.

“At 16,” says Rhodes, “Hedy forged a note to her teachers in Vienna saying, ‘My daughter won’t be able to come to school today,’ so she could go down to the biggest movie studio in Europe and walk in the door and say, ‘Hi, I want to be a movie star.’”

Hedy started as a script girl, but quickly earned some walk-on parts. The Austrian director Max Reinhardt took Hedy to Berlin when she starred in a few forgettable films before landing a role at age 18 in a racy film called Ecstasy by the Czech director Gustav Machatý. The film was denounced by Pope Pious XI, banned from Germany and blocked by US Customs authorities for being “dangerously indecent.”

Reinhardt called Hedy “the most beautiful woman in Europe,” and even before Ecstasy , Hedy was turning heads in theater productions across Europe. It was during the Viennese run of a popular play called Sissy that Hedy caught the eye of a wealthy Austrian munitions baron named Fritz Mandl. Hedy and Mandl married in 1933, but the union was stifling from the start. Mandl forced his wife to accompany him as he struck deals with customers, including officials from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, including Mussolini himself.

“She would sit at dinner bored out of her mind with discussions of bombs and torpedoes, and yet she was also absorbing it,” says Rhodes. “Of course, nobody asked her any questions. She was supposed to be beautiful and silent. But I think it was through that experience that she developed her considerable knowledge about how torpedo guidance worked.”

In 1937, Hedy fled her unhappy marriage (Mandl was deeply paranoid that Hedy was cheating on him) and also fled Austria, a country aligned with Adolf Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies.

A New Country and a New Name

Hedy landed in London, where Louis B. Mayer of MGM Studios was actively buying up the contracts of Jewish actors who could no longer work safely in Europe. Hedy met with Mayer, but refused his lowball offer of $125 a week for an exclusive MGM contract. In a savvy move, Hedy booked passage to the United States on the luxury liner SS Normandie , the same ship on which Mayer was traveling home.

“She made a point of being seen on deck looking beautiful and playing tennis with some of the handsome guys on board,” says Rhodes. “By the time they got to New York, Hedy had cut a much better deal with Mayer”—$500 a week—“with the proviso that she’d learn how to speak English in six months.”

Mayer had another demand—she had to change her name. Hedwig Kiesler was too German-sounding. Mayer’s wife was a fan of 1920s actress Barbara La Marr (who died tragically at 29 years old), so Mayer decided that his new MGM actor would now be known as Hedy Lamarr.

Actress by Day, Inventor by Night

It didn’t take long for Hedy to emerge as a bright new star in Hollywood. Her breakout role was alongside Charles Boyer (another European transplant) in Algiers (1938). From there, the MGM machine put Hedy to work cranking out multiple feature films a year throughout the 1940s.

“Any girl can be glamorous,” Hedy once quipped. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

As much as Hedy enjoyed her Hollywood stardom, her first love was still tinkering and problem-solving. She found a kindred spirit in Howard Hughes, the film producer and aeronautical engineer. When Hedy shared an idea for a dissolvable tablet that could turn a soldier’s canteen into a soft drink, Hughes lent her a few of his chemists.

But most of Hedy’s work was done at home at her engineering table where she’d sketch designs for creative solutions to practical problems. In addition to the tissue box attachment and the light-up dog collar, Hedy devised a special shower seat for the elderly that swiveled safely out of a bathtub.

“She was an inventor,” says Rhodes. “If you’ve ever been around real inventors, they’re often not people with a particularly deep education. They’re people who think about the world in a certain way. When they find something that doesn’t work right, instead of just swearing or whatever the rest of us do, they figure out how to fix it.”

Lamarr Takes on German U-Boats

In 1940, Hedy was distraught by the news coming out of Europe, where the Nazi war machine was steadily gaining territory and German U-boat submarines were wreaking havoc in the Atlantic. This was a far more difficult problem to fix, but Hedy was determined to do her part in the war effort.

The turning point came when Hedy met a man at a dinner party. George Antheil was an avante-garde music composer who lost his brother in the earliest days of the war. Antheil and Hedy were kindred spirits—two brilliant, if unconventional minds dead set on finding a way to defeat Hitler. But how?

That’s when Rhodes thinks Hedy leaned on the knowledge she picked up years earlier during those boring client dinners with her first husband in Vienna.

“She knew about torpedoes,” says Rhodes. “She knew there was a problem aiming torpedoes. If the British could take out German submarines with torpedoes launched from surface ships or airplanes, they might be able to prevent all of this slaughter that was going on.”

The answer was clearly some type of radio-controlled torpedo, but how would they stop the Germans from simply jamming the radio signal? Hedy and Antheil’s creative solution was inspired, Rhodes believes, by their mutual love of the piano.

Lamarr, Antheil Harness Music to Inspire Invention

During their late-night brainstorming sessions, Hedy and Antheil played a musical game. They’d sit down at the piano together, one person would start playing a popular song and the other would see how quickly they could recognize it and start playing along.

It was here, Rhodes thinks, that Hedy and Antheil first happened upon the idea of frequency hopping. If two musicians are playing the same music, they can hop around the keyboard together in perfect sync. However, if someone listening doesn’t know the song, they have no idea what keys will be pressed next. The “signal,” in other words, was hidden in the constantly changing frequencies.

How did this apply to radio-controlled torpedoes? The Germans could easily jam a single radio frequency, but not a constantly changing “symphony” of frequencies.

In his experimental musical compositions, Antheil had written songs for multiple synchronized player pianos. The pianos played in sync because they were fed the same piano rolls—a type of primitive, cut-out paper program—that controlled which keys were played and when. What if he and Hedy could invent a similar method for synchronizing communications between a torpedo and its controller on a nearby ship?

“All you need are two synchronized clocks that start a tape going at the same moment on the ship and inside the torpedo,” says Rhodes. “The signal between the ship and the torpedo would be continuous, even though it was traveling across a new frequency every split second. The effect for anyone trying to jam the signal is that they wouldn’t know where it was from one moment to the next, because it would ‘hopping’ all over the radio.”

It was Hedy who named their clever system “frequency hopping.”

Navy Rejects Invention

Hedy and Antheil developed their idea with the help of a wartime agency called the National Inventors’ Council , tasked with applying civilian inventions to the war effort. The Council connected Hedy and Antheil with a physicist from the California Institute of Technology who figured out the complex electronics to make it all work.

When their frequency hopping patent was finalized in 1942, Antheil pitched the idea to the U.S. Navy, which was less than receptive.

“What do you want to do, put a player piano in a torpedo? Get out of here!” is how Rhodes describes the Navy’s knee-jerk rejection. It was never given a chance.

Hedy and Antheil’s patent was locked in a safe and labeled “top secret” for the remainder of the war. The two entertainers went back to their day jobs, thinking that was the end of their inventing days. Little did they know that their patent would have a second life.

Frequency Hopping Tech Takes Off

In the 1950s, the electrical manufacturer Sylvania employed frequency hopping to build a secure system for communicating with submarines. And in the early 1960s, the technology was deployed on U.S. warships to prevent Soviet signal jamming during the Cuban Missile Crisis .

Antheil died in 1959, but Hedy lived on, unaware that her ingenious idea was about to take off in a big way.

When car phones first became popular in the 1970s, carriers used frequency hopping to enable hundreds of callers to share a limited spectrum of radio frequencies. The same technology was rolled out for the earliest cell phone networks.

By the 1990s, frequency hopping was so ubiquitous that it became the technology standard required by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for secure radio communications. That’s why Bluetooth, WiFi and other essential technologies are based, at their core, on an idea dreamed up by Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil.

“It’s a really deep and fundamental idea,” says Rhodes. “It has broad applications all over the place.”

Over time, Hedy’s Hollywood star fizzled and she retired to Florida, where she continued to tinker with new inventions, including a more “driver-friendly” type of traffic light. It wasn’t until Hedy was in her 80s that a group of engineers realized that the “Hedwig Kiesler Mackay” listed on the frequency hopping patent was none other than the Hollywood legend, Hedy Lamarr.

“Hedy didn’t want money, but she did want recognition,” says Rhodes, “and it really angered her that nobody gave her credit for this important invention. In the 1990s, she finally got an award for her contribution. And Hedy being Hedy, what did she say? ‘Well, it’s about time.’”

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Hedy Lamarr was a well-known actress in the 1930s and 40s, but she also invented "frequency hopping" -- the basis for wireless technology today. | Illustration by <a href="/node/2349957">Cort Kreer</a>.

It’s Women’s History Month on Energy.gov. During the month of March, we’re highlighting the great contributions to science, technology, engineering and mathematics or STEM fields made by women throughout history, as well as taking a look at fascinating work that women are doing in STEM fields today.

Hedy Lamarr was one of the most popular actresses of her day, but she was also an inventor, patenting a concept known as “frequency jumping.”

Here are some other facts about Hedy Lamarr you might not know:

• Hedy Lamarr’s real name is Hedwig.   She was born in Vienna, Austria in 1914 and started acting in German movies, where she caught the attention of Hollywood producers who brought her to America in the late 1930s.
• She was unhappily married to a Nazi Arms dealer. Lamarr’s move to America was as much an escape as a movie deal. However, the marriage afforded her the opportunity to rub elbows with German generals and admirals, which is probably where she first heard about military technology.
• Lamarr’s co-inventor was a composer.   During World War II, Lamarr partnered with George Anthiel, who used his knowledge of player pianos to help her come up with a workable concept.
• Their patent is the basis of modern cellphone technology. The basic concept was for radio signals to jump frequencies so that enemies couldn’t jam the signals. The technology was truly ahead of its time and was never used during World War II. However, the Navy used frequency jumping or spread spectrum technology during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Today it forms the basis of how mobile phones, fax machines, and other wireless communication works.
• Google honored her 101st birthday with a Google doodle. The short video shows Lamarr’s double life as a famous actress in front of the cameras, and incessant tinkerer in private.

Hedy Lamarr Biography

Birthday: November 9 , 1914 ( Scorpio )

Born In: Vienna, Austria

Recommended For You

Also Known As: Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler

Died At Age: 85

Spouse/Ex-: Friedrich Mandl, Gene Markey, John Loder, Lewis J. Boies, Teddy Stauffer, W. Howard Lee

father: Emil Kiesler

mother: Gertrud Kiesler

children: Anthony Loder, Denise Loder, James Lamarr Markey

Born Country: Austria

Actresses American Women

Height: 5'7" (170 cm ), 5'7" Females

Died on: January 19 , 2000

place of death: Casselberry, Florida, United States

Cause of Death: Heart Disease

Ancestry: Austrian American, Hungarian American

City: Vienna, Austria

You wanted to know

What inventions did hedy lamarr create.

Hedy Lamarr co-invented frequency hopping spread spectrum technology, which laid the foundation for modern wireless communication systems like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

How did Hedy Lamarr contribute to World War II efforts?

During World War II, Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes, which used frequency hopping to prevent enemies from jamming the signals.

Did Hedy Lamarr have a successful acting career?

Yes, Hedy Lamarr was a successful actress known for her roles in classic films such as "Algiers" and "Samson and Delilah."

Was Hedy Lamarr involved in any other scientific pursuits?

Aside from her inventions in wireless communication, Hedy Lamarr also worked on improvements to traffic signals and a tablet that would create a carbonated beverage when mixed with water.

How did Hedy Lamarr's inventions impact modern technology?

Hedy Lamarr's inventions, particularly frequency hopping technology, have had a significant impact on modern wireless communication systems and are a crucial element in technologies like GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi.

Recommended Lists:

Hedy Lamarr was not only a talented actress, but also a brilliant inventor. She co-invented a frequency-hopping technology during World War II that laid the foundation for modern Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technology.

Lamarr loved to tinker with gadgets and was known for taking apart and reassembling devices to understand how they worked.

In addition to her acting career, Lamarr was a licensed pilot and enjoyed flying in her spare time.

Lamarr was fluent in multiple languages, including German, English, and French, which allowed her to easily navigate the international film industry.

Hedy Lamarr Movies

  (Comedy, Romance)

  (Mystery, Romance, Drama)

  (Romance, Drama)

  (Romance, Drama, Adventure, History)

  (Adventure, Drama, Western, Romance)

  (Musical, Romance, Drama)

  (Drama, Romance)

  (Drama, Thriller, Romance, Film-Noir)

  (Drama, Mystery, Film-Noir, Crime)

  (Romance, Thriller, Film-Noir)

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Hedy Lamarr

Beautiful Hedy Lamarr was known mostly for being an elegant actress, being one of the MGM stars during the “Golden Age” and a well-known face during those years. Apart from being a crowd darling, she helped invent spread-spectrum communication techniques using frequency hopping. This technology is still used today, and it was the Austrian actress and inventor who contributed to its pilot development.

Hedy Lamarr was the stage by which she was known. Hedy was born on the 9th of November in 1914 to parents Emil Kiesler and Gertrud or “Trude” Kiesler in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. Her birth name was Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. She was of Jewish descent, her mother being a Budapest native who originally came from the “Jewish haute bourgeoisie.” Her father, who was born in Lemberg, was a secular Jew.

Early Career in Entertainment

She was 17 when Lamarr first appeared in a film, called “Geld Auf Der Strase” (Money On The Road). Her career in entertainment made a strong presence in the Czechoslovakian and German productions of that time. The German film “Extase” in 1932 brought Hedy to the attention of Hollywood producers. A few years later, she became an MGM contract star.

When Lamarr entered Hollywood, she adopted her stage name and her first Hollywood film, “Algiers” was released in 1938. Lamarr had a successful career in entertainment and was known as “the most beautiful woman in films”. She wrote an autobiography called “Ecstasy and Me” which detailed her private life.

She married her first husband, Friedrich Mandl, a wealthy Austrian in 1933. Lamarr’s autobiography described her husband as an extremely controlling man who prevented her growing her acting career. She stated that she felt imprisoned in their castle-like home where parties were held and where notable people like Hitler and Mussolini attended. Also in her autobiography, she stated that she devised a plan to escape her controlling marriage by disguising herself as her maid and then leaving for Paris, where she subsequently blossomed as an actress. They were divorced in 1937.

Secret Communications System

George Anthiel, an avant-garde composer happened to be Lamarr’s neighbor when she lived in California. The son of German immigrants, he had been experimenting with the automated controls of musical instruments, especially for the music he composed for the Ballet “Mecanique”.

During the Second World War, Lamarr and Antheil discussed how radio-controlled torpedoes that were being used by the navy could be disrupted by broadcasting a particular interference at the signal’s frequency control, which would ultimately lead the torpedo off target.

Together with Anthiel, Lamarr developed the “Secret Communications System”, a patented device which manipulated the radio frequencies at irregular intervals during reception or transmission. Their invention formed a kind of unbreakable code which prevented classified information and message transmissions from being intercepted by the enemy.

Lamarr obtained her knowledge about torpedoes from her first husband, Mandl, and she used her knowledge to help develop this invention. With Anthiel who incorporated the use of a piano roll, they were successfully able to devise frequency hopping. They used the 88 piano keys to randomly change the signals within the range of 88 frequencies.

In 1942 the patent for their invention was granted. However, the early version of the frequency hopping technique was met with disapproval by the United States navy and therefore was not adopted. Their idea was not used by the navy until 1962 when the military used it for a Cuban blockade; the patent had by then already expired.

In 1997, the invention was honored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation which gave Lamarr credit, although belatedly, for her contribution to this technology. Today, the work done by Lamarr and Anthiel is the basis for the modern spread-spectrum communication technology. It is the idea behind Bluetooth, Wi-Fi connections, and GPS.

Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council (NIC). However, it was said by the NIC member Charles Kettering that she could help with the war efforts better if she would use her celebrity status for selling war bonds.

Later Years and Death

In April of 1953 Lamarr became a naturalized American citizen at the age of 38. Her “Ecstasy in Me” autobiography was published in 1956, although she later stated that much of it was fiction.

Even in the 1970s, she was offered scripts, commercials for television, and stage projects. None of these offers, however, appealed to her and these years became her years of seclusion. In 1981, with her failing eyesight, she chose to retreat to Miami Beach in Florida.

During her life, Lamarr was married and divorced six times and she had three children.

On 19 January 2000, aged 86 Lamarr died in Florida due heart problems, namely arteriosclerotic heart disease, chronic valvular heart disease, and heart failure. Because of her contributions especially to the world of entertainment, she was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

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How Hedy Lamarr and Her Inventions Changed the World

Hedy Lamarr was the type of woman judgmental people love to underestimate. With her hazy green eyes, jet black hair, full lips, and coy smile, she was once known as the most beautiful woman in the world. Her looks were so captivating that she captured the attention of Hollywood producers in the 1930s and 1940s. However, as Lamarr once said, “The brains of people are more interesting than the looks . . .” This especially rang true with her. Although she became typecast as the exotic, seductive femme fatale, she was one of the most prolific inventors of the 20th century , embodying the phrase “women in tech” before the concept even existed.

What Did Hedy Lamarr Invent?

The highlights of lamarr’s life.

Lamarr begins her acting career. Her roles become progressively more important. In 1933, she received international recognition as the lead in  Ecstasy . Despite a great performance, the film included explicit content such as nudity, creating a reputation she never seemed to shake. 

Lamarr meets Louis Mayer, a famous Hollywood executive, in London. Shortly thereafter, she secures a contract with MGM and moves to the United States. 

However, Lamarr wasn’t fulfilled by living life solely as a beautiful woman and famous actress. As the U.S. got involved in World War II, she decided to put her inventive mind to the test to help out with the war effort. 

The Years Preceding Her Passing

Following her tenure as a Hollywood actress, Lamarr gave a few interviews and even had an autobiography published in her name (although she later sued the ghostwriter for saying most of the book was fiction).

A Deeper Look Into Hedy Lamarr’s Inventions

Redesigning faster airplanes during wwii.

On the eve of the U.S.’s involvement in WWII, one of Lamarr’s boyfriends, aviation tycoon Howard Hughes, took note of her brilliance. His new partner’s creativity and intelligence astounded him, causing the businessman to introduce her to his aerodynamics team so she could help advance the planes.

Hedy Lamarr and WiFi

You might be wondering who invented WiFi. While Lamarr wasn’t technically the WiFi inventor, she conceptualized the type of spread spectrum technology that makes it possible. In 1940, she met self-proclaimed “bad boy” composer George Antheil at a dinner party. The two bonded in conversation after discussing how disturbed Lamarr was over the tragic sinking of the SS  City of Benares . Out of the 90 evacuees who were children heading to safety from Britain to Canada, 77 perished due to an enemy torpedo striking the ship. 

Lamarr wouldn’t let this chance meeting go to waste—she wanted to help out and serve in the war efforts. She  provided  Antheil with her phone number by writing it on his windshield in red lipstick. 

Shortly after that, the two worked together on a wireless communication system that prevented enemy forces from “jamming” or blocking the signal that guided the Allies’ torpedoes. She called the invention “frequency hopping” since the system caused radio waves from the transmitter and receiver to change to a new one simultaneously. Hopping from various frequencies made it impossible to find and redirect incoming signals so a torpedo would miss its target. 

Other Notable Inventions

As Lamarr once said, “All creative people want to do the unexpected.” Her inventions speak to this statement. During her lifetime, she came up with ideas for a chair that revolved in and out of the shower, a better traffic light, a tablet that made drinks carbonated, and a fluorescent dog collar. 

The Long Road to a Proper Legacy

Even though she lived in an age where women had to choose to be beautiful or intelligent, she bravely chose both. Although she didn’t receive the recognition she deserved for her innovative mind while she was alive, her legacy has shifted in recent years.

Defining the “ Think Big Anyway ” Mentality

There’s a poem by Kent M. Keith that Lamarr loved reading to her children before bedtime called “ The Paradoxical Commandments .” After learning about her life, it’s easy to see why Lamarr chose these words to instill into her kids. 

The end of the poem reads:

“The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway.”

Hedy Lamarr

The Official Website of Hedy Lamarr

HEDY LAMARR

Brains & beauty, jeff beck and johnny depp - this is a song for miss hedy lamarr [official music video].

Jeff Beck and Johnny Depp have collaborated on a new album, “18,” which draws its title from the youthful spirit and creativity they discovered in recording together. The musical soulmates have released the lead single from the album, “This Is A Song For Miss Hedy Lamarr,” an homage to the actress/inventor.

Paintings by Denise Loder-DeLuca

Denise Loder-DeLuca is an established artist who has done a series of paintings of her mother, Hollywood actress (inventor, & artist) HEDY LAMARR .

About Hedy Lamarr

She was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on November 9, 1914 in Vienna, Austria. At 17 years old, Hedy starred in her first film, a German project called  Geld auf der Strase . Hedy continued her film career by working on both German and Czechoslavakian productions. The 1932 German film  Exstase  brought her to the attention of Hollywood producers, and she soon signed a contract with MGM.

“Hope and curiosity about the future seemed better than guarantees. That’s the way I was. The unknown was always so attractive to me… and still is.”

Bombshell: the hedy lamarr story.

What do the most ravishingly beautiful actress of the 1930s and 40s and the inventor whose concepts were the basis of cell phone and bluetooth technology have in common? They are both Hedy Lamarr, the glamour icon whose ravishing visage was the inspiration for Snow White and Cat Woman and a technological trailblazer who perfected a secure radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes during WWII. Weaving interviews and clips with never-before-heard audio tapes of Hedy speaking on the record about her incredible life—from her beginnings as an Austrian Jewish emigre to her scandalous nude scene in the 1933 film  Ecstasy  to her glittering Hollywood life to her ground-breaking, but completely uncredited inventions to her latter years when she became a recluse, impoverished and almost forgotten—BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY brings to light the story of an unusual and accomplished woman, spurned as too beautiful to be smart, but a role model to this day.

Filmography

Often called “The Most Beautiful Woman in Film,” Hedy Lamarr’s beauty and screen presence made her one of the most popular actresses of her day. She was part of 30 films in an acting career spanning 28 years.

In The News

Want to learn more about continuing the legacy of hedy lamarr.