Lamarr, Hedy, 1913-2000

Hedy Lamarr; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, November 9, 1914, Vienna, Austria-Hungary; died January 19, 2000 (aged 85), Casselberry, Florida, U.S.; only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (née Lichtwitz; 1894–1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880–1935). Her father was born to a Galician-Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a successful bank director. Her mother, Trude, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Hungarian-Jewish family. She converted to Catholicism and raised her daughter Hedy as a Christian as well. As a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. Lamarr helped get her mother out of Austria after the Anschluss and to the United States, where Gertrud later became an American citizen. She put "Hebrew" as her race on her petition for naturalization, a term then often used in Europe; Producer Max Reinhardt then cast her in a play entitled The Weaker Sex, which was performed at the Theater in der Josefstadt. Reinhardt was so impressed with her that he brought her with him back to Berlin; However, she never actually trained with Reinhardt or appeared in any of his Berlin productions. Instead, she met the Russian theatre producer Alexis Granowsky, who cast her in his film directorial debut, The Trunks of Mr. O.F. (1931), starring Walter Abel and Peter Lorre. Granowsky soon moved to Paris, but Lamarr stayed in Berlin and was given the lead role in No Money Needed (1932), a comedy directed by Carl Boese. Lamarr then starred in the film which made her internationally famous; After arriving in London in 1937, she met Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, who was scouting for talent in Europe. She initially turned down the offer he made her (of $125 a week), but then booked herself onto the same New York bound liner as him, and managed to impress him enough to secure a $500 a week contract. Mayer persuaded her to change her name from Hedwig Kiesler (to distance herself from "the Ecstasy lady" reputation associated with it), choosing the surname "Lamarr" in homage to the beautiful silent film star, Barbara La Marr, on the suggestion of his wife Margaret Shenberg, who admired La Marr; introduced her to producer Walter Wanger; cast in the lead opposite Charles Boyer; Her second American film was to be I Take This Woman, co-starring with Spencer Tracy under the direction of regular Dietrich collaborator, Josef von Sternberg. Von Sternberg was fired during the shoot, replaced by Frank Borzage. The film was put on hold, and Lamarr was put into Lady of the Tropics (1939), where she played a mixed-race seductress in Saigon opposite Robert Taylor. She returned to I Take This Woman, re-shot by W. S. Van Dyke; Far more popular was Boom Town (1940) with Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert and Spencer Tracy; Lamarr was teamed with James Stewart in Come Live with Me (1941), playing a Viennese refugee. Stewart was also in Ziegfeld Girl (1941), where Lamarr, Judy Garland and Lana Turner played aspiring showgirls – a big success; Lamarr was top-billed in H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), although the film's protagonist was the title role played by Robert Young; Crossroads (1942) with William Powell; Lamarr played the seductive native girl Tondelayo in White Cargo (1942), top-billed over Walter Pidgeon; Back at MGM Lamarr was teamed with Robert Walker in the romantic comedy Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945); Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council, but was reportedly told by NIC member Charles F. Kettering and others that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell war bonds; after leaving MGM in 1945, Lamarr formed a production company with Jack Chertok and made the thriller The Strange Woman (1946), She tried a comedy with Robert Cummings, Let's Live a Little (1948); Lamarr enjoyed her greatest success playing Delilah opposite Victor Mature as the biblical strongman in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, the highest-grossing film of 1950; Lamarr returned to MGM for a film noir with John Hodiak, A Lady Without Passport (1950), which flopped. More popular were two pictures she made at Paramount, a Western with Ray Milland, Copper Canyon (1950), and a Bob Hope spy spoof, My Favorite Spy (1951); Among the few who knew of Lamarr's inventiveness was aviation tycoon Howard Hughes; During World War II, Lamarr learned that radio-controlled torpedoes, an emerging technology in naval war, could easily be jammed and set off course. She thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. She contacted her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her develop a device for doing that, and he succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized player-piano mechanism with radio signals. They drafted designs for the frequency-hopping system, which they patented; Their invention was granted a patent under US Patent 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942 (filed using her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey). However, it was technologically difficult to implement, and at that time the U.S. Navy was not receptive to considering inventions coming from outside the military. In 1962 (at the time of the Cuban missile crisis), an updated version of their design at last appeared on Navy ships. In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, given to individuals whose creative lifetime achievements in the arts, sciences, business, or invention fields have significantly contributed to society. In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame; Lamarr was married and divorced six times and had three children: Friedrich Mandl (married 1933–37), Gene Markey (married 1939–41), adopted a child, James Lamarr Markey (born January 9, 1939), John Loder (married 1943–47), Children: Denise Loder (born January 19, 1945), and Anthony Loder (born February 1, 1947), Ernest "Ted" Stauffer (married 1951–52), W. Howard Lee (married 1953–60), Lewis J. Boies (married 1963–65); Lamarr became a naturalized citizen of the United States at age 38 on April 10, 1953