Actress and Inventor
By all accounts, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was a difficult woman. As the film star Hedy Lamarr, she not only alienated the directors and actors she worked with but also all six of her husbands, none of whom lasted more than a few years.
Her problem, and problem it was, is that she was extraordinarily beautiful, which masked her intellectual brilliance, a fact that made her unable to persuade those who could have helped her that she was an inventor whose technical genius could have changed the direction of WW2 if the Allied powers had believed in her.
At the beginning of the War, along with pianist and composer George Antheil, Lamarr had the idea for a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers which they patented. The invention was offered to the Navy, who rejected it on the basis that it would be too large to fit in a torpedo and it was not put into operational use until after the War, and then independently of their patent.
Born in Vienna to a wealthy Jewish family, the young Hedwig was determined to make her own decisions. She decided to get into the movies. At the age of 18, her breakthough role was the lead in Gustav Machatý’s film Ecstasy . She played the neglected young wife of an indifferent older man. The film gained international recognition after winning an award at the Venice Film Festival. Considered overly sexual, it was banned in America and in Germany but she was on her way. Next stop, American theatre and movies.
Throughout her life she knew what she wanted and was ruthless about getting it. Having turned down a contract for $125 a week from Louis B. Mayer she then pursued him until he agreed to pay her $500 a week on a contract which made her a star. She had a leading role in nearly thirty movies. In her spare time, she studied science and technology. Among her many patented inventions was an improved traffic stoplight.
Hedy Lamarr was litigious. She sued everybody for every real or imagined issue. She died 25 years ago today aged 85. Not surprisingly, she died alone, a recluse, seeing nobody, estranged from at least one of her children, disowning another, and still furious with everybody. She was a kind of genius but the kind who can prove that looks aren’t everything.
Here, on YouTube, is a collection of Hedy Lamarr movies. Take a look at Algiers, made with Charles Boyer in 1938, her first Hollywood success, and you’ll see what the fuss was all about. If there has been a more beautiful woman in the history of cinema I have yet to come across her.
The post Ruth Leon recommends… Hedy Lamarr – Actress and Inventor appeared first on Slippedisc.
