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Hedy Lamarr
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Hedy Lamarr was a remarkable combination of movie star and inventor. She was born in Vienna in 1914 as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. She achieved fame in 1933 as the star of the scandalous Czech film Extase, which featured the first nude scene in cinematic history. The same year Lamarr married Fritz Mandl, one of the five leading European armament manufacturers. Mandl specialized in shells and grenades, but from the mid-thirties on he ... manufactured military aircraft. He was interested in control systems and conducted research in the field.
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Months later Hedy Lamarr was spotted by the MGM mogul Louis B Mayer. He signed her as a result of her notoriety, but insisted that she change her name and make less sensational films. Lamarr made a number of films under Mayer. Her first was in 1938 as Gaby in the film Algiers. This was followed a year later in 1939 with a role in Lady of the Tropics. Then in 1942 she landed a starring role in White cargo.
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From All Movie Guide: The daughter of a Vienesse banker, Hedy Lamarr began her acting career at 16 under the tutelage of German impresario Max Reinhardt. She began appearing in German films in 1930, but garnered little attention until her star turn in Czech director Gustav Machaty's Extase (Ecstasy) in 1933. It wasn't just because Lamarr appeared briefly in the nude; Extase was filled to overflowing with orgasmic imagery, including tight close-ups of Lamarr in the throes of delighted passion. Though her first husband, Austrian businessman Fritz Mandl, tried to buy up and destroy all prints of Extase, the film enjoyed worldwide distribution, the result being that Lamarr was famous in America before ever setting foot in Hollywood. She was signed by producer Walter Wanger to co-star with Charles Boyer in the American remake of the French Pepe Le Moko, titled Algiers (1938). That Lamarr wasn't much of an actress was compensated with several scenes in which she was required to merely stand around silently and look beautiful (she would later downgrade these performances, equating sex appeal with "looking stupid").
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Hedy Lamarr, one of the last remaining goddesses from Hollywood's Golden Era, was found dead in her suburban Orlando, Fla., home Wednesday. She was 86. The Austrian-born Lamarr, with her alabaster skin and raven-colored hair, was once billed as the world's most beautiful woman. Her leading men at M-G-M in the '30s and '40s included Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Charles Boyer, who never said "Come with me to the Casbah" to her, despite legend to the contrary. In 1949 she played Delilah to Victor Mature's Samson in the Cecil B. DeMille epic. During WWII, she ... helped develop a patent for an innovation that prevented radar signals from jamming, based upon an idea she picked up from one of her six husbands.
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Hedy Lamarr's co-inventor, George Antheil, was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1900. His parents were from East Prussia. After studying music at what is now the Curtis Institute, in Philadelphia, he went to Europe to pursue a career as a concert pianist, heading first to Berlin and then settling in Paris in 1923. He became one of the top avante-garde composers of the time, writing and playing machinelike, "mechanistic," rhythmically propulsive pieces with names like Airplane Sonata, Sonata Sauvage, Jazz Sonata, and Death of Machines. His Ballet Méanique was scored for sixteen player pianos, xylophones and percussion and was first performed in Paris in June 1926, in a version that had only one player piano but ... had electric bells, airplane propellers and a siren. It caused an uproar.
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Hedy Lamarr is recognised around the world as one of the most beautiful women to have graced the silver screen. Yet despite this celebrity few people are aware that she was ... responsible for one of the key communications technologies of the 21st Century – spread spectrum. Born in Vienna in 1914, the daughter of a successful banker, Hedwig Eva Maria Keisler, first found fame when she appeared in Ecstasy, an Austrian-Czech film with a story line considered highly daring for its time. Containing what was reputedly the first instance of nudity in cinematic history, her appearance in the film brought her considerable notoriety in a society that was becoming increasing repressed. As the Nazi movement within Germany and Austria became ever more powerful, so her husband Fritz Mandl, an armament manufacturer became more ever more closely involved with the regime. Fearing for the future, and against her husband’s wishes, she packed her bags, reputedly drugged her maid, and escaped through an upstairs window, fleeing firstly to London and thence to Hollywood.
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Hedy Lamarr