Hedy Lamarr, hauntingly beautiful actress, and mother of modern mobile phone technology.

Hedy Lamarr (November 9, 1913 – January 19, 2000), born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, was an Austrian-born American actress and communications technology innovator. Though known primarily for her great beauty and her successful film career, she also co-invented the first form of spread spectrum, a key to modern wireless communication.

Early life and education

Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria in 1913. While married to her first husband, Friedrich Mandl, aka Fritz Mandl Budde, an arms manufacturer, she became educated technically in her husband's business. Mandl was 13 years older than Lamarr, and extremely possessive of her. To escape him, one night she drugged her maid and took a train to London.

Movie career

After her flight from Mandl, she met Louis B. Mayer in London. After he hired her, at his insistence she changed her name to Hedy Lamarr, choosing the surname in homage to a famously beautiful film star of the silent era, Barbara LaMarr, who had died of a drug overdose in 1926.

Lamarr had already appeared in several European films, including Ecstasy (1933), A Czech film, in which she played a love-hungry young wife of an indifferent old husband. Closeups of her face in passion, and long shots of her running nude through the woods, gave the film notoriety, as the first actress to appear nude in a regular film. She also gained notoriety as one of the first actresses to bare her breasts in a major film and for faking an orgasm on film. Mandl bought up as many copies of the film as he could possibly find, as he objected to her nudity, as well as "the expression on her face."

In Hollywood, she was usually cast as glamorous and seductive. Her many films include Algiers (1938), White Cargo (1942), and Tortilla Flat (1942), based on the novel by John Steinbeck. In 1941 she was cast alongside two other Hollywood beauties, Lana Turner and Judy Garland in the musical extravaganza Ziegfeld Girl.

Her biggest success came as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949) with Victor Mature as the Biblical strongman. Lamarr was cast more for her stunning exotic beauty—which the 1 October 1938 issue of Vogue described as a "fatal Sunday supplement beauty, somnambulistic and aloof"—than her ability as an actress.

Lamarr became a naturalized citizen of the United States on April 10, 1953. For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Hedy Lamarr has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd.

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Filmography

Frequency-hopped spread spectrum invention

Hedy Lamarr (under her then-married name of Hedy Kiesler Markey) and composer George Antheil received U.S. Patent 2,292,387 for their Secret Communication System on August 11, 1942. This early version of frequency hopping used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam. This idea was controversial and ahead of its time and technology. The technology was not implemented until 1962, when it was used by U.S. military ships during a blockade of Cuba,[3] after the patent had expired. Neither Lamarr nor Antheil made any money from the patent. Perhaps due to this lag in development, the patent was little-known until 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Lamarr an award for this contribution.

Lamarr's frequency-hopping idea served as the basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology used in devices ranging from cordless telephones to WiFi Internet connections. The technology in particular that is often attributed to her and George Antheil is CDMA.[4] Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council but she was told that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell War Bonds. She once raised $7,000,000 at just one event.

Death

Lamarr died in Altamonte Springs, Florida (near Orlando) on January 19, 2000.

Legacy

In 2003, the Boeing corporation ran a series of recruitment ads featuring Hedy Lamarr as a woman of science. No reference to her film career was made in the ads. In 2005, the first Inventor's Day in German-speaking countries was held in her honor on November 9, on what would have been her 92nd birthday.

Marriages

Briefly engaged to the actor George Montgomery in 1942,[5] Lamarr was married to:

• Friedrich Mandl (1900–1977), married 1933–37; chairman of Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik, a leading armaments firm founded by his father, Alexander Mandl. Mandl, although partially of Jewish descent, was a Nazi sympathizer.
• Gene Markey (1895-1980), screenwriter and producer, married 1939–41; son (adopted in 1941, after their divorce), James Lamarr Markey (b. 1939).[6] When Lamarr and Markey divorced — she claimed they had only spent four evenings alone together in their marriage — the judge advised her to get to know any future husband longer than the four weeks she had known Markey. Previously, he was married to actresses Joan Bennett and Myrna Loy.
• John Loder (born John Muir Lowe, 1898–1988), actor, married 1943–47; two children: Anthony Loder (b. 1947) and Denise Loder (b. 1945). Loder adopted Hedy's son, James Lamarr Markey, and gave him his surname. James Lamarr Loder later challenged Hedy Lamarr's will in 2000, which did not mention him. He later dropped his suit against the estate in exchange for a lump-sum payment of $50,000.
• Ernest "Ted" Stauffer (1909-1991), nightclub owner, restaurateur, and former bandleader, married 1951–52.
• W. Howard Lee (1909–1981), a Texas oilman, married 1953–60. In 1960, he remarried film star Gene Tierney.
• Lewis J. Boies (b. 1920), a lawyer, married 1963–65. They were divorced after Lamarr claimed he had threatened her with a baseball bat.