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Dive into the life of Hedy Lamarr, a visionary Hollywood actress and inventor who revolutionized modern technologies.
Hedy Lamarr, or Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler by her real name, was born on November 9, 1914 in Vienna, Austria. The only child of Emil Kiesler, a bank director, and Gertrud Lichtwitz, a pianist, Hedwig spent her time playing theater from a young age. It was at 16 that her dream of acting took a real turn when she presented herself to the Sascha studios of Vienna. After a few appearances in films by Georg Jacoby and an experience as a scriptwriter, Hedwig made her first successful film, No Need for Money by Carl Boese, before playing in Thirteen Trunks of Mr. O.F. by Alexis Granowsky, a film in which her beauty was greatly noticed. At 18, the actress was the first to play a scene of orgasm in cinema in Ecstasy by Gustav Machaty. It was at the same time that Hedy married Friedrich Mandl, a wealthy industrialist, arms dealer, and supplier to Mussolini.
But life with Friedrich, her jealous and possessive husband, was not rosy. In 1937, the actress decided to leave him and flee Nazi Germany for the United States, not far from Hollywood. A stroke of luck for Hedwig, now Hedy. She landed a contract with the largest studio in California, MGM, and continued to act in new feature films. At the time, many considered her the most beautiful woman in the world and many men courted her. She would later serve as the model for portraying Snow White and Catwoman. Hedy would marry six times. But the actress grew tired of playing the roles of a femme fatale and decided to let her genius run free.
Described as an "intellectual giant compared to other Hollywood actresses" by her friend, the pianist George Antheil, the two partners quickly became interested in armaments. In June 1941, while World War II was raging, the two inventors filed a patent for a secret communication system designed for radio-guided torpedoes so that the torpedo's transmitter-receiver system could change frequency and thus prevent the detection of the submarine attack by the enemy. This ingenious communication system intended for the American army would only be used in 1962, for the Cuban Missile Crisis, without ever being recognized for their genius. This invention is actually the ancestor of "frequency hopping spread spectrum," the method of transmission for WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth. Technologies well known and used by everyone today.
Hedy Lamarr continued to act in films for Hollywood for a few more years before her career declined. It was not until 1997 that the contribution of the Hollywood actress was recognized. That same year, Hedy received the award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Three years before her death on January 19, 2000. Posthumously, in 2014 first, her name and that of George Antheil joined the list of the National Inventor Hall of Fame, then in 2018, a documentary by Alexandra Dean, From Extase to WiFi highlights her ingenuity.