Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr

Lamarr in The Conspirators (1944)
Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler
November 9, 1913(1913-11-09)
Vienna, Austria
Died January 19, 2000(2000-01-19) (aged 86)
, U.S.
Years active 1930–1958
Spouse Fritz Mandl (1933–1937) (divorced)
Gene Markey (1939–1941) (divorced) 1 child
John Loder (1943–1947) (divorced) 2 children
Teddy Stauffer (1951–1952) (divorced)
W. Howard Lee (1953–1960) (divorced)
Lewis J. Boies (1963–1965) (divorced)

Hedy Lamarr (November 9, 1913 – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American actress of Jewish descent. Though known primarily for her film career as a major contract star of MGM's "Golden Age", she also co-invented an early technique for spread spectrum communications, a key to many forms of wireless communication.[1]

Contents

Early life and career in Europe

Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, to Jewish parents Gertrud (née Lichtwitz), a pianist and Budapest native who came from the "Jewish haute bourgeoisie", and Lemberg-born Emil Kiesler, a successful bank director.[2][3] She studied ballet and piano at age 10. When she worked with Max Reinhardt in Berlin, he called her the "most beautiful woman in Europe". Soon the teenage girl played major roles in German movies, alongside stars like Heinz Rühmann and Hans Moser.

In early 1933 she starred in Gustav Machatý's notorious film Ecstasy, a Czechoslovak film made in Prague, in which she played the love-hungry young wife of an indifferent old husband. Closeups of her face and long shots of her running nude through the woods gave the film notoriety.

On 10 August 1933 she married Friedrich Mandl, a Vienna-based arms manufacturer 13 years her senior. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, Lamarr described Mandl as an extremely controlling man who sometimes tried to keep her shut up in their mansion. The Austrian bought as many copies of Ecstasy as he could possibly find, objecting to her in the film, and "the expression on her face". (Lamarr later claimed the looks of passion were the result of the director poking her in the bottom with a safety pin.)[4]

Mandl prevented her from pursuing her acting career, and instead took her to meetings with technicians and business partners. In these meetings, the mathematically-talented Lamarr learned about military technology. Otherwise she had to stay at the castle Schloss Schwarzenau. She later related that, even though Mandl was part-Jewish, he was consorting with Nazi industrialists, which infuriated her. In Ecstasy and Me, Lamarr wrote that dictators Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler both attended Mandl's grand parties. She related that in 1937 she disguised herself as one of her maids and fled to Paris, where she obtained a divorce, and then moved on to London. According to another version of the episode, she persuaded Mandl to allow her to attend a party wearing all her expensive jewelry, later drugged him with the help of her maid, and made her escape out of the country with the jewelry.

Movie career in Hollywood

First she went to Paris, then 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 beautiful film star of the silent era, Barbara La Marr,[4] who had died in 1926 from a drug overdose.

Lamarr and Robert Walker in Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945)

In Hollywood, she was usually cast as glamorous and seductive. Her American debut was in Algiers (1938). Her many films include Boom Town (1940), White Cargo (1942), and Tortilla Flat (1942), based on the novel by John Steinbeck. White Cargo, one of Lamarr's biggest hits at MGM, contains arguably her most famous film quote, "I am Tondelayo". In 1941, she was cast alongside two other Hollywood beauties, Lana Turner and Judy Garland in the musical extravaganza Ziegfeld Girl.

She made 18 films from 1940 to 1949 even though she had two children during that time (in 1945 and 1947). She left MGM in 1945; Lamarr enjoyed her biggest success as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, the highest-grossing film of 1949, with Victor Mature as the Biblical strongman. However, following her comedic turn opposite Bob Hope in My Favorite Spy (1951), her career went into decline. She appeared only sporadically in films after 1950, one of her last roles being that of Joan of Arc in Irwin Allen's critically panned epic The Story of Mankind (1957). The publication of her autobiography Ecstasy and Me (1967) took place about a year after accusations of shoplifting, and a year after Andy Warhol's short film Hedy (1966), also known as The Shoplifter. The controversy surrounding the shoplifting charges coincided with a failed return to the screen in Picture Mommy Dead (1966). The role was ultimately filled by Zsa Zsa Gabor. Ecstasy and Me begins in a despondent mood, with reference to this:

On a recent evening, sitting home alone suffering and brooding about my treatment at the police station because of an incident in a department store, and being replaced by Zsa Zsa Gabor in a motion picture (imagine how that pleased the ego!) I figured out that I had made — and spent — some thirty million dollars. Yet earlier that day I had been unable to pay for a sandwich at Schwab's drug-store.

In the ensuing years, Lamarr retreated from public life, and settled in Florida. She returned to the headlines in 1991 when the 78-year-old former actress was again accused of shoplifting $21.00 worth of goods, although charges were eventually dropped.

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.[5]

Frequency-hopping spread-spectrum invention

Avant garde composer George Antheil, a son of German immigrants and neighbor of Lamarr, had experimented with automated control of musical instruments, including his music for Ballet Mecanique, originally written for Fernand Léger's 1924 abstract film. This score involved multiple player pianos playing simultaneously.

Together, Antheil and Lamarr submitted the idea of a secret communication system in June 1941. On August 11, 1942, U.S. Patent 2,292,387 was granted to Antheil and "Hedy Kiesler Markey", Lamarr's married name at the time. 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.

The idea was ahead of its time, and not feasible owing to the state of mechanical technology in 1942. It was not implemented in the USA until 1962, when it was used by U.S. military ships during a blockade of Cuba[6] after the patent had expired. Perhaps owing to this lag in development, the patent was little-known until 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Lamarr an award for this contribution.[1] In 1998, Ottawa wireless technology developer Wi-LAN, Inc. "acquired a 49 percent claim to the patent from Lamarr for an undisclosed amount of stock" (Eliza Schmidkunz, Inside GNSS);[7] Antheil had died in 1959.

Lamarr's and Antheil's frequency-hopping idea serves as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as COFDM used in Wi-Fi network connections and CDMA used in some cordless and wireless telephones.[8] Blackwell, Martin, and Vernam's 1920 patent Secrecy Communication System (1598673) seems to lay the communications groundwork for Kiesler and Antheil's patent which employed the techniques in the autonomous control of torpedoes.

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.

For several years during the 1990s, the boxes of the current CORELDRAW software suites were graced by a large Corel-drawn image of Hedy Lamarr, in tribute to her pre-computer scientific discoveries. These pictures were winners in CORELDRAWs yearly software suite cover design contests. Far from being flattered, however, Lamarr sued Corel for using the image without her permission. Corel countered that she did not own rights to the image. They reached an undisclosed settlement in 1999.[9]

Death

Lamarr died in Altamonte Springs, Florida (near Orlando) on January 19, 2000. Her son Anthony Loder took her ashes to Austria and spread them in the Wienerwald forest, in accordance with her wishes.[10]

Legacy

John Hodiak and Lamarr in A Lady Without Passport (1950)

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.[11]

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.[12]

In 2004, the game Half-Life 2, which contains many other references to important scientific names/situations/facts, made an homage to Hedy, by giving the name Lamarr to Dr. Kleiner pet headcrab (de-beaked and completely harmless).

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 and romances

Briefly engaged to the German actor, Fred Doederlein and later, actor George Montgomery in 1942.[13] Lamarr was also married to:

The final affair mentioned in Ecstasy and Me is when Lamarr is around fifty and is with a much younger man, an artist called Pierre who Lamarr describes as 'a very handsome young man ... he was a sensitive man; I liked him immediately.' During this affair, Lamarr collaborated with Pierre on his paintings and lives a somewhat bohemian lifestyle 'In the new house we didn't have electricity or gas and it was freezing cold. We found a few candles and we sat near them trying to keep warm ... we just painted, made love and ate once in a while.'

Filmography

  • Das Geld liegt auf der Straße (Money on the Street, 1930)
  • Die Frau von Lindenau (Storm in a Water Glass, 1931)
  • Die Abenteuer des Herrn O. F. (The Adventures of Mr. O. F., 1931)
  • Man braucht kein Geld (We Need No Money, 1932)
  • Ekstase / Symphonie der Liebe (Ecstasy, 1933)
  • Algiers (1938) (download or play it)
  • 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)
  • Ziegfeld Girl (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) (download or play it)
  • Dishonored Lady (1947) (download or play it)
  • 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 (1957)
  • The Female Animal (1958)

Personal life

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Electronic Frontier Foundation (11 March 1997). "Movie Legend Hedy Lamarr to be Given Special Award at EFF's Sixth Annual Pioneer Awards". Press release. Archived from the original on May 18, 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20080518225429/http://w2.eff.org/awards/pioneer/1997.php. Retrieved 4 July 2007. 
  2. ↑ HIGH CLASS WHORE.(actress Hedy Lamarr) | Article from CineAction | HighBeam Research
  3. ↑ Search Results
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 "The ecstasy". The Independent. January 30, 2005. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/film-and-tv/features/the-ecstasy-488903.html. Retrieved 2008-02-21. 
  5. ↑ Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. "Hollywood Walk of Fame directory". http://www.hollywoodchamber.net/icons/walk_directory.asp. Retrieved 2007-07-04. 
  6. ↑ IEEE - Hedy Lamarr, 1914 - 2000
  7. ↑ Player Pianos, Sex Appeal, and Patent #2,292,387, Inside GNSS September 2006 http://www.insidegnss.com/node/303
  8. ↑ MicroTimes: The Birth Of Spread Spectrum
  9. ↑ UPI (April 7, 1998): "Hedy Lamarr Sues Corel" [1]
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Calling Hedy Lamarr, Mischief Films
  11. ↑ http://www.theregister.co.uk/1998/12/02/corel_settles_in_lamarr_pic/
  12. ↑ Ivanis 2003
  13. ↑ "Hedy Lamarr Engaged: Screen Star, 27, to Be Bride of George Montgomery, 25", The New York Times, 25 March 1942, p. 23
  14. ↑ "Hedy Lamarr Adopts Baby Boy", The New York Times, 5 November 1941, p. 30
  15. ↑ Orlando Sentinel (Oct. 24, 1991): "Hedy Lamarr Won't Face Theft Charges If She Stays In Line" [2] Retrieved 2010-6-10
  16. ↑ Hedy Lamarr, with Leo Guild and Cy Rice, "Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman", NY: Bartholomew House, 1966
  17. ↑ "Hedy Lamarr Loses Suit to Halt Book", The New York Times, 27 September 1966, p. 74
  18. ↑ "Lamarr Autobiography Prompts Plaigarism Suit", The New York Times, February 1967, p. 18

External links