One of the most glamorous actresses of the 1930s and 1940s, Hedy Lamarr was promoted as “the world’s most beautiful woman.” She co-starred with the likes of Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart and Spencer Tracy. She dated Howard Hughes. She produced movies at a time when, particularly for a woman, that was unthinkable. And she invented a communication system that was an early version of the technology in your iPhone.
Born in Austria in 1914, Hedwig Kiesler was the only child of affluent German-Jewish parents who had resettled in Vienna. Her parents exposed her to city’s rich arts culture that led to an early infatuation with movies. From her father, she developed a love of learning how things worked. At six she took apart then reassembled her music box to understand how the music was made.
Beautiful and determined, she headed to Austria’s largest film studio at 16 and within days was appearing in small parts. Quickly graduating to a leading role she starred in Ekstase, a risqué film that the Pope condemned and Hitler refused to let it be shown in Germany.
At 18, Lamarr married 33-year-old Friedrich Mandl, a munitions magnate who sold arms to the German army. Mandl was obsessed with his young bride and jealously demanded his staff monitor her every movement. To break free, she sewed jewelry into her clothes, then escaped to London disguised as her maid.
There she met Louis B. Mayer who was recruiting European film stars escaping from the Nazis. She refused his initial contract offer, then wisely booked passage on the same ship he was taking back to the States. During the voyage he became so enamored that he offered her five times the original offer to join MGM. Over the next two decades she would make 25 movies.
In the Hollywood studio system she had little control over the roles she played. As her popularity grew, Mayer had her working nearly nonstop. Their relationship was already strained when he cast her in White Cargo as an amoral African woman named Tondelayo, complete with dark body makeup. That performance was satirized by everyone from Lucille Ball to Andy Warhol. Defying Mayer, she starred in and produced three movies on her own to limited success before meeting the director Cecil B. Demille who cast her in Samson and Delilah. It would be her most successful movie. The only film more popular that year was Gone With The Wind.
In her downtime Lamarr worked on inventions. She claimed credit for changing the design of his planes when she dated Howard Hughes. She developed a tablet that became soda when dropped in water, thinking it would be useful to soldiers. Her most lasting invention was a patent for “frequency hopping” developed with composer George Antheil. Given to the Navy during WWII, its purpose was to guide torpedoes using radio signals. It wasn’t used until 1957 when a government contractor put her idea to use for military purposes during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Her invention would become the basis for future technologies like Bluetooth and WiFi, but she never earned money from the technology and wasn’t widely credited for her work until the 1990s.
In her personal life, Lamarr would marry six times and have three children. In 1939 she adopted a son who would learn in 2001 that he was actually born out of wedlock to Lamarr and the man who would become her third husband. Her sixth husband was her divorce attorney from husband number five. They divorced in 1965 and she never remarried.
In her later years she unknowingly became addicted to methamphetamine when her doctor began injecting her with “vitamin’ shots. Suffering pubic humiliation through botched plastic surgeries and two arrests for shoplifting, Lamarr became a recluse, communicating with friends and family mainly through phone calls and letters. She died in her sleep in 2000 at that age of 85. As was her wish, her ashes were spread in the woods near her hometown of Vienna.