Passport March 2023

Hedy Lamarr was a beautiful, glamorous film star during Hollywood’s Golden Age, but what is not so well known is that she was also an inventor.

She was born in Vienna, Austria on 9 November 1914 with the birth name Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler.

Her father, a successful banker, came from a Jewish family in what is now Lviv, Ukraine, while her mother, also with a Jewish background, came from Budapest and was a concert pianist. Hedy was interested in the theatre and acting from an early age. At 12 she won a beauty contest in Vienna. But she was also interested in technology, an interest which came from her father, who explained topics to her on their walks.

Her early career started in Vienna, when she got herself hired as a script girl by a film company, Sascha Films. That got her a foot in the door and she went on to be hired as an extra and then had a small speaking part in a couple of films. The producer, Max Reinhardt, was impressed with her and cast her in a play “The Weaker Sex”, before taking her back to Berlin with him. However, she didn’t actually appear in any of Reinhardt’s productions because she met a Russian theatre producer, Alexis Granowsky, who cast her in his first film “The Trunks of Mr O F “ in 1931. Granowsky left for Paris, but Hedy stayed in Berlin and after a part in a comedy, she was given the leading role in the film that would make her famous. At the age of only 18, she played the part of a young woman neglected by her older husband. The film by Gustav Machaty was called “Ecstasy”. It was very controversial, as it showed her in the throes of sexual ecstasy and also in brief nude scenes. Regarded as an artistic film in Europe, it won a prize at the Venice Film Festival, but was also banned in Germany and in the USA.

She returned to Vienna and was given several stage roles, amongst them the lead in “Empress Elizabeth of Austria”, which was critically acclaimed. Many admirers sent her flowers and tried to visit her backstage, but she rejected them all, except for the persistent Friedrich Mandl, an extremely wealthy arms dealer with links to Mussolini and later Hitler. Hedy was swept off her feet and she married him on 10 August 1933. She was 18 and he was 33. He strongly disapproved of her acting and refused to allow her to continue, keeping her a virtual prisoner in their home. Eventually she left him, escaping in disguise to Paris and later to London in 1937, and wrote:
“I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife. … He was the absolute monarch in his marriage. … I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own.”

One benefit of this marriage however was that she accompanied her husband to conferences, where she came into contact with scientists and gained an insight into applied science and technology, which she found useful later in life.

In fact Hedy was married and divorced 6 times between the years of 1933 and 1965, when she divorced for the final time. None of the marriages lasted long, but she did have 2 children with her third husband John Loder. She had also adopted a child when married to her second husband, Gene Markey, who turned out later to be her illegitimate son with John Loder, thus giving her 3 children in total, although she was estranged from her first, illegitimate son, James, for most of her life, starting from when he was only 12.

In London Hedy met the MGM Studios impresario Louis B Meyer, who offered her a contract on 125$ a week, which she turned down. However, after a clever move of booking a ticket on the same
liner he was returning on and managing to impress him on the journey, she was hired at 500$ a week. On his advice she changed her name to Hedy Lamarr and went on to make many films in
Hollywood. The first in 1938 was “Algiers” with Charles Boyer, which was very successful. She went on to play opposite many famous leading men including Spencer Tracy, Robert Taylor and Clark Gable, very often typecast as the glamorous seductress of exotic origin. Her most successful films included “Boom Boom” in 1940 and “Comrade X” in the same year, both with Clark Gable. Her most well known film came in 1950 in Cecil B DeMille’s Oscar winning film “Samson and Delilah”, where she played Delilah opposite Victor Mature’s Samson. She became an American citizen in 1953. Hedy made her last film, “The Female Animal,” in 1958 and was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.

Despite her many successful films, Hedy had begun to find her roles rather boring, so during World War II she turned to inventing to relieve the tedium. She had no formal training, but taught herself the basics. Her most notable invention was a frequency hopping system to prevent radio controlled torpedoes from being jammed or turned off course by the enemy. She collaborated with her friend, the composer and pianist George Antheil, and they managed to invent a radio controlled system for played pianos based on perforated paper tape. She and Antheil were granted a US Patent for this invention in 1942. In fact the US military wasn’t using radio guided torpedoes anyway, so it may have seemed a wasted effort, but the principles of their work were used much later in the Bluetooth and GPS technology we use today! In recognition of this, both she and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. In 1997, Hedy became the first woman to be awarded the Invention Convention’s BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, often known as the “Oscars of Invention.”

She became rather a recluse in her later years, only communicating with friends and family by telephone during the last few decades of her life. She died in January 2000 in Casselberry, Florida, aged 85. Her son Anthony Loder fulfilled her wish to spread her ashes in the Vienna Woods and in 2014 his request that her remaining ashes be interred in an honorary grave in Vienna was granted. This can be found in the Vienna Central Cemetery.

Link: https://brusselswomens.club/celebrating-women-hedy-lamarr/