Hedy Lamarr

PROFILE

​Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; 9 September or 9 November 1914– 19 January 2000) was an Austrian-born American actress, inventor, and film producer. She appeared in 30 films over a 28-year career in Europe and the United States, and co-invented an early version of frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication, originally intended for torpedo guidance.

Lamarr was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, and acted in a number of Austrian, German, and Czech films in her brief early film career, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933). In 1937, she fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, secretly moving to Paris and then on to London. There she met Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio, who offered her a Hollywood movie contract, where he began promoting her as "the world's most beautiful woman".

She became a star through her performance in Algiers (1938), her first American film.

Dismayed by being typecast, Lamarr co-founded a new production studio and starred in its films: The Strange Woman (1946), and Dishonored Lady (1947). But her greatest success was as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949). She also acted on television before the release of her final film, The Female Animal (1958). She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.

At the beginning of World War II, Lamarr and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system using frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology for Allied torpedoes, Recognition of the value of their work resulted in the pair being posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Biography

​Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Emil Kiesler (1880–1935) and Gertrud Kiesler (1894–1977). Her father was a bank director at the Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Her mother was a concert pianist, born in Budapest to an upper-class Hungarian-Jewish family.

As a child, Hedy Kiesler showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film.

she attended a private school, where she received piano, ballet, language and natural sciences lessons.

At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. She also began to associate invention with her father, who would take her out on walks, explaining how various technologies in society functioned.

​At the age of 16 she gained a role as an extra in Money on the Street (1930), and then a small speaking part in Storm in a Water Glass (1931).

In early 1933, at age 18, Hedy Kiesler, still working under her maiden name, was given the lead in Gustav Machatý's film Ecstasy (Ekstase in German, Extase in Czech). She played the neglected young wife of an indifferent older man.

The film became both celebrated and notorious for showing the actress's face in the throes of an orgasm.

Ecstasy gained world recognition after winning an award in Rome. Throughout Europe, the film was regarded as an artistic work. It was banned, however, in the United States and in Nazi Germany.

Best ​Kiesler also played a number of stage roles, including a starring one in Sissy, a play about Empress Elisabeth of Austria produced in Vienna in early 1933, just as Ecstasy premiered. It won accolades from critics.

Admirers sent roses to her dressing room and tried to get backstage to meet Hedy Kiesler.
One such admirer Friedrich Mandl became obsessed with getting to know her. Mandl was a Viennese arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She fell for his charming and fascinating personality, partly due to his immense wealth. Her parents, both of Jewish descent, did not approve, as Mandl had ties to Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini.

On August 10, 1933, at the age of 18, Hedy Kiesler married Mandl, then 33. The son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Mandl insisted that she convert to Catholicism before their wedding in Vienna Karlskirche.

In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, Mandl is described as an extremely controlling husband. He strongly objected to her having been filmed in the simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and reportedly spent over $300,000 buying up and destroying copies of the film.

He also prevented her from pursuing her acting career.

She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their home Castle Schwarzenau [de], in the remote Waldviertel, near the Czech border.

Mandl had close social and business ties to the Italian government, selling munitions to the country, and, despite his own part-Jewish descent, had ties to the Nazi regime of Germany. Hedy Kiesler accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and she became interested in nurturing her latent talent in science.

Finding her marriage to Mandl eventually unbearable, Kiesler decided to flee her husband as well as her country. According to her autobiography, she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris. She writes about her marriage:

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.

After arriving in London in 1937, she met Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, who was scouting for talent in Europe. She initially turned down the offer he made her (of $125 a week), but booked herself onto the same New York-bound liner as he. During the trip, she impressed him enough to secure a $500 a week contract.

Mayer persuaded her to change her name from Hedwig Kiesler (to distance herself from "the Ecstasy lady" reputation associated with it). She chose the surname "Lamarr" in homage to the beautiful silent film star, Barbara La Marr, on the suggestion of Mayer's wife, Margaret Shenberg.

When Mayer brought Lamarr to Hollywood in 1938, he began promoting her as the "world's most beautiful woman". He introduced her to producer Walter Wanger, who was making Algiers (1938), an American version of the noted French film, Pépé le Moko (1937). Lamarr was cast in the lead opposite Charles Boyer. The film created a "national sensation".

The lack of acting challenges bored Lamarr, and she reportedly took up inventing to relieve her boredom.

Although Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she worked in her spare time on various hobbies and inventions, which included an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink. The beverage was unsuccessful; Lamarr herself said it tasted like Alka-Seltzer.

Among the few who knew of Lamarr's inventiveness was aviation tycoon Howard Hughes. She suggested he change the rather square design of his aeroplanes (which she thought looked too slow) to a more streamlined shape, based on pictures of the fastest birds and fish she could find. Lamarr discussed her relationship with Hughes during an interview, saying that while they dated, he actively supported her inventive "tinkering" hobbies. He put his team of scientists and engineers at her disposal, saying they would do or make anything she asked for.

During the war, Hedy Lamarr, feeling the need to help her adopted country, she participated in a war bond-selling campaign. In 10 days, Lamarr tracked to 16 cities and sold approximately $25 million (over $350 million when adjusted for inflation in 2020) worth of war bonds.

After learning that radio-controlled torpedoes, an emerging technology in naval war, could easily be jammed and set off course, she thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. She conceived an idea and contacted her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her implement it. Together they developed a device for doing that, when he succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized player-piano mechanism with radio signals.They drafted designs for the frequency-hopping system, which they patented.

Their invention was granted a patent under U.S. Patent 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942 (filed using her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey). However, it was technologically difficult to implement, and at the time the US Navy was not receptive to considering inventions coming from outside the military. Nevertheless, it was classified in the "red hot" category. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, an updated version of their design was installed on Navy ships. Today, various spread-spectrum techniques are incorporated into Bluetooth technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of Wi-Fi. Lamarr and Antheil's contributions were formally recognized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

In 1997, Lamarr and George Antheil were jointly honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award. And Lamarr was the first woman to receive the Invention Convention's BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, known as the "Oscars of inventing".

That same year, Canadian company WiLAN signed an agreement with Hedy Lamarr to acquire 49% of the marketing rights of her patent, and a right of first refusal for the remaining 51% for ten quarterly payments. This was the only financial compensation she received for her frequency-hopping spread spectrum invention. A friendship ensued between her and the company's CEO, Hatim Zaghloul.

In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology.

In 1942, MGM refused to lend her out for the film Casablanca (1942) which had been inspired in part by Algiers and written with Lamarr in mind as its female lead, and three years later, after making the romantic comedy Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945), playing a princess who falls in love with a New Yorker, she ended her contract with MGM.

​After leaving MGM in 1945, Lamarr formed production company Mars Film Corporation with Jack Chertok and Hunt Stromberg, producing two film noir motion pictures which she also starred in: The Strange Woman (1946) as a seductress manipulating a son with the goal of convincing him to murder his father (her husband), and Dishonored Lady (1947) as a formerly suicidal fashion magazine editor trying to start a new life but getting accused of murder. Both films grossed over their budgets, but were not large commercial successes

Lamarr enjoyed her greatest success playing Delilah opposite Victor Mature as the biblical strongman in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949). A massive commercial success, it became the highest-grossing picture of 1950 and won two Academy Awards (Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design) of its five nominations. Lamarr won critical acclaim for her portrayal of Delilah.

She became a naturalized citizen of the United States at age 38 on April 10, 1953.

As her career declined, she went to Italy to play multiple roles in Loves of Three Queens (1954), which she also produced. However she lacked the experience necessary to make a success of such an epic production, and lost millions of dollars when she was unable to secure distribution of the picture.

Her last film was a thriller, The Female Animal (1958).

In 1960, Lamarr was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contribution to the motion picture industry, at 6247 Hollywood Blvd adjacent to Vine Street where the walk is centered.

​After leaving her first husband Friedrich Mandl in 1937, Hedy Lamarr married another five times and had three children.

Second husband Gene Markey (married 1939–41), screenwriter and producer. During this marriage, she adopted a boy, James Lamarr Markey (born January 9, 1939), who was in reality her own son with actor John Loder. 

Fourth husband Ernest "Ted" Stauffer (married 1951–52), nightclub owner, restaurateur, and former bandleader.

During the 1970s, Lamarr lived in increasing seclusion. She was offered several scripts, television commercials, and stage projects, but none piqued her interest. In 1974, she filed a $10 million lawsuit against Warner Bros., claiming that the running parody of her name ("Hedley Lamarr") featured in the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles infringed her right to privacy. The studio settled out of court for an undisclosed nominal sum and an apology to Lamarr for "almost using her name".

​With her eyesight failing, Lamarr retreated from public life and settled in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1981.

In the last decades of her life, Lamarr communicated only by telephone with the outside world, even with her children and close friends. She often talked up to six or seven hours a day on the phone, but she spent hardly any time with anyone in person in her final years. 

​Lamarr died in Casselberry, Florida, on January 19, 2000, of heart disease, aged 85. According to her wishes, she was cremated and her son Anthony Loder spread her ashes in Austria's Vienna Woods.

​Asteroid 32730 Lamarr, discovered by Karl Reinmuth at Heidelberg Observatory in 1951, was named in her memory. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on August 27, 2019.

On November 6, 2020, a satellite named after her (ÑuSat 14 or "Hedy", COSPAR 2020-079F) was launched into space.

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