Hedy Lamarr - Rotten Tomatoes Celebrity Profile

Biography

This page uses content from the Hedy Lamarr biography page on the English version of Wikipedia and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. This list of authors can be seen in the page history. Rotten Tomatoes disclaims any and all warranties as to the accuracy or reliability of the content.

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

Life

Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria and died in Altamonte Springs, Florida (near Orlando, Orange County, Florida).

While married to her first husband, Friedrich Mandl, aka Fritz Mandl, an arms manufacturer, she socialized with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. She also became educated technically in her husband's business. Mandl was obsessed with his wife and never let her out of his sight. She hated him and his Nazi friends and finally escaped to London, reportedly by drugging him and the French maid he had hired to spy on her. Ironically, Mandl was from a Jewish background. Whether the Nazis ever knew about Mandl's and Lamarr's Jewish origins has been debated by historians; Friedrich Mandl came from an extremely assimilated and well-known and highly influential family, and it appears that he overtly hid his Jewish origins and converted to Christianity under evident pressure. Many also say that Lamarr's co-invention of spread spectrum as a potential World War II military application was sparked by her desire to do anything in her power to help see Nazism defeated.

She met Louis B. Mayer in London. He hired her and changed her name to Hedy Lamarr, 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. She had already appeared in several European films, including Ecstasy (1933), 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. She also gained notoriety as one of the first actresses to bare her breasts in a major 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 appeared in many films, usually cast as glamorous and seductive, including Algiers (1938), White Cargo, and Tortilla Flat (both 1942), based on the novel by John Steinbeck. In 1941 she was cast alongside two other Hollywood beauties Lana Turner and Judy Garland in a musical extravaganza Ziegfeld Girl (1941), Her biggest success came in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949) with Victor Mature as the Biblical strongman. Lamarr was used 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.

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 didn't begin to be implemented until 1962, when it was used by U.S. military ships during a blockade of Cubahttp://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/history_center/biography/lamarr.html, after the patent 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 awardhttp://www.eff.org/awards/pioneer/1997.php 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.

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.

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"Hedy Lamarr Engaged: Screen Star, 27, to Be Bride of George Montgomery, 25", The New York Times, 25 March 1942, p. 23, 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. In 1938, when his property was seized by the Austrian government, Mandl, although also of Jewish descent, was a Nazi sympathizer who had become close to Prince Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg, the deposed Fascist Austrian Vice-Chancellor. Mandl fled to Brazil and later to Argentina, where he became a citizen and remarried several times. He also became an advisor to Juan Perón, and a film producer, whose leading ladies included the future Eva Perón. He also founded an airplane factory called "Industria Metalúrgica y Plástica Argentina", and he served a prison sentence there, too.

Gene Markey (1895-1980), screenwriter and producer, married 1939–41; son (adopted in 1941, after their divorce), James Lamarr Markey (b. 1939)."Hedy Lamarr Adopts Baby Boy", The New York Times, 5 November 1941, p. 30 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 more than the four weeks she had known Markey. Previously he was married to the 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.

Anecdotes

In one story presented in her biography, Ecstasy and Me, once while running away from Friedrich Mandl, she slipped into a brothel and hid in an empty room. While her husband searched the brothel, a man entered the room and she had sex with him so she could remain hidden. She was finally successful in escaping when she hired a new maid who looked like herself, drugged her, and then used the maid's uniform as a disguise to escape.Hedy Lamarr, with Leo Guild and Cy Rice, "Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman", NY: Bartholomew House, 1966 Lamarr later sued the publisher claiming that many of the anecdotes in the book, which was described by a judge as "filthy, nauseating, and revolting," were fabricated by its ghost writer, Leo Guild."Hedy Lamarr Loses Suit to Halt Book", The New York Times, 27 September 1966, p. 74"Lamarr Autobiography Prompts Plaigarism Suit", The New York Times, February 1967, p. 18

According to accounts in film histories, Cecil B. DeMille is said to have gathered the 1900 peacock feathers that Lamarr wore on her 18-foot-train dress in the 1949 movie Samson and Delilah himself, having followed molting peacocks on his ranch for the previous 10 years, until he had collected enough feathers to have the garment made.

For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Hedy Lamarr has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd.

In an interview appended to the DVD release of Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks claims that Hedy Lamarr threatened to sue the producers. He says she believed the film's running "Hedley Lamarr" joke infringed her right to publicity. In one scene, one character even warns another that Hedy would sue. Brooks says they settled out of court for a small sum.

In 1965 Lamarr made headlines for being arrested for shoplifting; charges were eventually dropped. This bizarre situation played out again in 1991.

In 1998, a vector illustration of Lamarr's face was used by Corel Corporation on the packaging and in the publicity for its CorelDraw 8 software. Lamarr sued Corel for damages relating to unauthorized use of her likeness. The case was resolved in 1999 and settled out-of-court for an undisclosed sum, under terms that allowed Corel five years of exclusive rights to the image.http://www.theregister.co.uk/1998/12/02/corel_settles_in_lamarr_pic/

Quotes

"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."

"Films have a certain place in a certain time period. Technology is forever."

Filmography

Money on the Street (1930)
Storm in a Water Glass (1931)
The Trunks of Mr. O.F. (1931)
We Need No Money (1932)
Ecstasy (1933)
Algiers (1938)
Hollywood Goes to Town (1938) (short subject)
Screen Snapshots: Stars at a Charity Ball (1939) (short subject)
Lady of the Tropics (1939)
I Take This Woman (1940)
Boom Town (1940)
Comrade X (1940)
Come Live with Me (1941)
H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941)
Tortilla Flat (1942)
Crossroads (1942)
White Cargo (1942)
Show Business at War (1943) (short subject)
The Heavenly Body (1944)
The Conspirators (1944)
Experiment Perilous (1944)
Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945)
The Strange Woman (1946)
Dishonored Lady (1947)
Let's Live a Little (1948)
Samson and Delilah (1949)
A Lady Without Passport (1950)
Copper Canyon (1950)
My Favorite Spy (1951)
The Eternal Female (1954) (unfinished)
Loves of Three Queens (1954)
The Story of Mankind (film) (1957)
The Female Animal (1958)

References

External links

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify the biographical information on this page under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.