Hedy Lamarr was not only the first to appear naked in a movie and fake an orgasm on camera, but also invented a radio communication system with protection against interception.
I think people's brains are more interesting than their looks.
Hollywood actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr said in 1990, 10 years before her death.
Hedy Lamarr is a charming actress of the 40s of the last century, who became known to the world not only for her striking appearance and successful acting career, but also because of her truly outstanding intellectual abilities.
Often confused in the photo for another 20th-century cinematic beauty, Vivien Leigh (Scarlett, Gone with the Wind), Hedy gave the world the ability to use spread spectrum communications (thanks to which today we can use mobile phones and Wi-Fi).
Vivien Leigh and Hedy Lamarr
The life path and career of this extraordinary woman was not easy, but at the same time exciting and remarkable.
Hedy Lamarr, who received the name Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler at birth, was born on November 9, 1914 in Vienna, Austria, in a Jewish family of pianist Gertrud Lichtwitz and bank director Emil Kiesler. Her mother was from Budapest, and her father was from a Jewish family living in Lvov.
From childhood, the girl conquered everyone with her abilities and talent. She studied ballet, attended theater school, played the piano, and the little girl also enthusiastically studied mathematics. Since the family was wealthy, there was no need to work at an early age, but despite this, Hedy left her parents' house at the age of 16 and entered a theater school. At the same time, at the age of 17, she began acting in films, making her debut in 1930 in the German film Girls in a Nightclub. She continued her film career working on German and Czechoslovak films.
The beginning of her career was very successful, but still over the next three years she was just one of many, the Czechoslovak-Austrian film "Ecstasy" by Gustav Mahata brought her world fame. The film for 1933 was provocative and controversial.
The ten-minute scene of nude swimming in a forest lake is quite innocent by the standards of the XNUMXst century, but in those years it caused a storm of emotions. In some countries, the tape was even banned from showing, releasing it only a few years later with censorship.
Hedy Lamarr in Rapture, 1933
The hype around the film and the furious resentment from the church played into the hands of the actress, as thanks to this she became infamous. At that moment, the nudity itself was not the cause of the scandal, but it was the scene of the first imitation of orgasm in the history of cinema, convincingly played by a girl, that caused a great flurry of emotions. Later, the actress said that the director specially pricked her with a safety pin during the filming of an erotic scene so that the sounds made seemed believable.
After the scandalous film, the parents made every effort to quickly give their daughter in marriage. Hedy's first husband was the Austrian Fritz Mandl, a millionaire weapons manufacturer who supported the Nazis and produced weapons for the Third Reich. Traveling with her husband to meetings and meetings, Hedy listened attentively and memorized everything the men were talking about - and their conversations at that time were very interesting, because Mandl's production laboratories were working on creating radio-controlled weapons for the Nazis. But this fact "shot" later.
Her husband turned out to be a terrible owner, and besides, he was jealous of everyone she met. It ended up that the young wife was literally locked in her "golden cage", not being able to act in films, and then just meet friends. He tried to buy all copies of "Ecstasy" from the Vienna box office. The nightmarish marriage lasted for four years, but, unable to bear such an attitude towards herself, the unfortunate wife of a rich and powerful ammunition manufacturer in the middle of the night, after putting sleeping pills on the maid and putting on her clothes, runs away from the house on a bicycle and boards the Normandy steamer.
She emigrated to the United States on the eve of World War II, and on a ship that followed from London to New York, she met the head of the MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) studio, Louis Mayer. Lamarr spoke some English, which was not bad, as she was able to get a lucrative contract to shoot in Hollywood films.
In order not to cause unnecessary associations with the American Puritan public, he takes a pseudonym, borrowing it from the MGM actress Barbara La Marr, Meyer's former favorite, who died in 1926 from a broken heart due to drug abuse.
A new career stage is unfolding successfully. During her career in Hollywood, the actress played in such popular films as Algiers (1938, the role of Gaby), Lady in the Tropics (1939, the role of Manon de Vernet), the adaptation of J. Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat (1942, dir. Victor Fleming, the role of Dolores Ramirez), "Risky Experiment" (1944), "The Strange Woman" (1946) and Cecil deMille's epic film "Samson and Delilah" (1949). The last appearance on the screen - in the film "The Female Animal" (1958, the role of Vanessa Windsor).
Even the fact that during this period Lamarr became the mother of three children did not interfere with acting. True, in different sources this information is contradictory, since, perhaps, one child was not his own son.
Hedy left Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1945. In total, Hedy Lamarr earned $ 30 million from filming.
The Viennese beauty found a life in Beverly Hills and interacted with famous people such as John F. Kennedy and Howard Hughes, who provided her with equipment to conduct experiments in her trailer during a time when she was not filming. It was in this scientific environment that Lamarr found her true calling.
Hedy Lamarr was a loving, passionate and fickle woman, periodically in need of novelty. It is not surprising that in addition to legal spouses, and there were six of them throughout her life, the actress had many lovers.
Two years after running away from her first husband, Lamarr remarried. The second husband was the screenwriter and producer Gene Macri, he was madly in love with his wife, but Hedy was not in love with him. Despite the fact that she had a loving husband, she simultaneously had an affair with actor John Loder and even gave birth to a child from him (according to some sources). Makri agreed to accept Khedi's son, because he could not imagine his life without this luxurious woman. However, after a couple of years, she still divorced, and Lamarr began to live with the father of her child, John Loder, with whom they soon formed a relationship.
The third marriage of the actress lasted 4 years. During this time, she gave birth to Loder two more children: a son and a daughter. And in 1947 she expressed her desire to divorce. Three more official marriages followed: with restaurateur and musician Teddy Stuffer (1951-1952), oilman William Howard Lee (1953-1960) and lawyer Lewis Boyes (1963-1965) .
As you can see, the fate of Hedy Lamarr was not the most happy. Six marriages did not bring her happiness. Relations with three children were also far from ideal.
Often referred to as "the most beautiful woman in films", Hedy Lamarr's beauty and screen presence made her one of the most popular actresses of her day.
Of course, the acting field glorified Lamarr, but scientific activity brought her real immortality.
As if being a beautiful, talented actress wasn't enough, Hedy was also extremely smart and inventive. She knew mathematics well and, through the efforts of her first husband, was well versed in weapons.
Her abilities and their application were inspired by her meeting with the avant-garde composer and inventor George Antheil. Having talked somehow with the actress, he realized that his interlocutor is much smarter than she seems.
Lamarr was delighted that he used strange instruments and arrangements in his music and enjoyed a lot of crafting and inventing, as she did. Hedy was inspired by his way of using multiple punched tapes for a mechanical piano, allowing you to switch playback from one instrument to another without compromising the music (literally, "without losing a single beat"). Later, they successfully patented the ingenious pseudo-random frequency hopping (PRFC) technology, embodying the mentioned idea of ββusing punched tapes to protect radio waves from jamming. In the same way that careful timing of punched tapes ensures the continuity of music played on different pianos, the radio signal switches from one channel to another.
This idea later became the mainstay of both secure military communications and mobile phone technology. In August 1942, together with the composer George Antheil, she received a patent number 2 "Secret Communication System (Secret Communication System)", allowing remote control of torpedoes. The value of "frequency hopping" technology was only appreciated many years later. The impetus for the invention was a message about an evacuation ship sunk on September 292, 387, on which 17 children died. Her extraordinary ability in the exact sciences allowed her to reproduce many of the technical details of the conversations about weapons that her first husband had with his colleagues.
Together with George, they set about inventing a radio-controlled torpedo, the control of which could not be intercepted or jammed. Lamarr shared a very important idea with Antheil: if you remotely report the coordinates of a target to a guided torpedo over one frequency, then the enemy can easily intercept the signal, jam it or redirect the torpedo to another target, and if you use a random code on the transmitter that will change the transmission channel, then it is possible to synchronize the same frequency transitions on the receiver. This change of communication channels guarantees the secure transmission of information. Until that time, pseudo-random codes were used to encrypt information transmitted over unchanging open communication channels. Here there was a step forward: the secret key began to be used to quickly change the channels of information transmission.
Schematic from a 1942 patent. Image: Flickr / Floor, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. (A figure from the 1942 patent. Image: Flickr/Floor, distributed under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.)
The original idea, intended to solve the problem of enemy radio-controlled missile jamming during World War II, involved changing radio frequencies at the same time to prevent enemies from detecting the signal. She wanted to give her country a military edge. While the technology of the time did not initially allow the idea to be realized, the advent of the transistor and its subsequent reduction made Hedy's idea very important for both military and cellular communications.
However, the American Navy then rejected the project because of the difficulty in implementation, and it began to be used to a limited extent only in 1962, so the inventors did not receive royalties for it. But half a century later, that patent became the basis for spread-spectrum communications, which are now used in everything from mobile phones to Wi-Fi.
"It's easy for me to invent," Lamarr said in "Bombshell". "I don't have to think of ideas, they just come."
But, according to a new documentary about her life, technical thinking is her main legacy. It's called Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story. The film follows the patent that Lamarr filed for frequency hopping technology in 1941, which was the forerunner of secure Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth. Frequency hopping spectrum is one of the most important aspects of code division multiple access (CDMA) that is used in many of the technologies we use today. One of the first is GPS, which you use every time you check your location on the maps app on your smartphone. Mobile phones also used CDMA for phone signals, and if you've ever downloaded anything over a 3G network, you've used technology based on the inventions of Lamarr and Antheil. Frequency hopping technology is all around us, it's easy to take it for granted, but the invention was worthy of admiration and respect for being so creative and inventive.
However, Lamarr did not receive the fame and compensation she deserved for her ideas. The patent she filed with inventor George Antheil was designed to protect their military invention for radio communications, which could "jump" from one frequency to another so the Nazis couldn't detect Allied torpedoes. To this day, neither Lamarr nor her fortune has received a dime from the multi-billion dollar industry for which her idea paved the way, although the US military has publicly acknowledged her frequency hopping patent and contribution to technology.
Lamarr's work as an inventor was hardly publicized in the 1940s. This flaw, which Bombshell director and Reframed Pictures co-founder Alexandra Dean believes fits into the narrow narrative of the movie star in those days.
Professor Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, in "Bombshell" states that MGM studio executive Louis B. Mayer, who first signed Lamarr's Hollywood contract, saw women defined as two types: they were either seductive, or they had to be put on a pedestal and admired from afar. Professor Horak believes that a woman who is both sexy and delightful was not someone Meyer is willing to accept or present to the audience.
This impressive technological achievement, combined with her acting talent and stellar quality, has made "the most beautiful woman in the movie" one of the most interesting and intelligent women in the film industry.
βLouis B. Mayer divided the world into two types of women: the Madonna and the whore. I don't think he ever believed she was anything but the latter," Horak says in the film, referring to Lamarr.
Dr. Simon Naik, chair of branding at ESSEC Business School in Paris and a previous fellow at Harvard Business School, agrees that Hollywood categorizes women in two ways. Dr. Naik teaches Power Brand Anthropology at ESSEC and is an expert on the use of female archetypes in advertising and media.
According to Dr. Nike, women are positioned as one of three archetypes: the powerful and intelligent queen, the seductive princess, or the femme fatale, which is a combination of both. He says these archetypes go back to Greek mythology and are still used to depict women in media and advertising. Dr. Nick says that "femme fatale" is the category that the beautiful, brilliant inventor Lamarr fits into, and that multidimensional women often look very menacing.
"A powerful, sexy, but smart woman... It's really scary for most guys," says Dr. Nike. "You're just showing how weak we are."
Dr. Naik points out that historically, women have been positioned in the media in antiquated, one-dimensional frames created from the point of view of men. Within this framework, multi-faceted women like Lamarr are often only valued for their physicality, and not for their ability to think, invent, and create. This information about women's disabilities is expected to be made available to an impressive audience around the world.
βThe position of women is almost like a toy,β says Dr. Naik. βThey don't have the right to vote. And that's exactly the problem."
Therefore, Dr. Nick is not surprised that Lamarr's entrepreneurial activities in the production and direction of films in the 1940s were not supported. Or that it took decades for the Lamar narrative to develop to do justice to her as the inventor that she was.
Lamarr's daughter, Denise Loder, is proud of her mother's inventive mind and the work she has done throughout her career to push the boundaries of how women are perceived. She points out that her mom was one of the first women to own a production company and tell stories from a female perspective.
βShe was so ahead of her time when she became a feminist,β Loder says in Bomba
("Bombshell"). "She was never called that, but she certainly was."
It took a long time, but Lamarr and Antheil are now widely recognized as the inventors of frequency hopping, which led to the development of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS. In 1997, when Lamarr turned 82, the Electronic Frontier Foundation honored her with two achievement awards.
Lamarr did not think and did not consider herself smarter than those around her. Instead, it is her attitude and views in various life situations that distinguish her from others. She asked questions. She wanted to improve things. She saw the problems and knew they needed to be solved. Some people in her life thought this was the wrong attitude and she was often criticized for being a difficult star. But Lamarr did exactly what she wanted, so she clearly won. And how did she win? As she said in "Popcorn in Paradise": I win because I learned many years ago that the one who is afraid of losing money always loses. I don't care so I win.
She died three years later.
Last year, the Digital Entertainment Group, an American association that supports and promotes entertainment platforms, presented Geena Davis with the Hedy Lamarr Award for innovation in the entertainment industry, for her work on gender and the media. The award recognizes women who have made significant contributions to the entertainment and technology industries.
A few years ago, Lamarr became the subject of a Google doodle.
So if you're reading this on your phone, think of the woman who contributed to this.
Hedy's quarrelsome and categorical character quarreled with all of Hollywood and made her persona non grata in cinema circles. Lamarr acted in films until 1958, after which she decided to take a long break. During this time, she co-wrote her autobiography, Rapture and Me, with screenwriter Leo Guild and journalist Cy Rice. This book, published in 1966, was a blow to the career of an actress.
The work said that the girl suffers from nymphomania, and also has sex with men and women. These details provoked furious condemnation from the Hollywood public. The inventor denied all the scandalous fragments of the book, claiming that co-authors had secretly added them, but after the scandal she was never offered star roles.
After that, the 52-year-old actress tried to return to the screen, but this was prevented by the persecution campaign launched against her. The quarrelsome, harsh character, the habit of frankly expressing an unflattering opinion about Hollywood and its mores, gathered many influential enemies around the actress.
In 1997, Lamarr was officially awarded for her discovery, but the actress did not arrive at the ceremony, but only handed over an audio recording of her welcoming speech.
In her old age, Khedi led a secluded life and did not communicate directly with anyone, preferring telephone conversations.
In general, the last years of Hedy Lamarr were not very joyful, filled with scandals and vile gossip, and very lonely.
She spent them in a nursing home, where she died at the age of 86.
The actress died in Casselberry, Florida on January 19, 2000. Lamarr's cause of death was heart disease. According to the will, the son of Anthony Loder scattered the ashes of his mother in Austria, in the Vienna Woods.
The merits of Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil were officially recognized only in 2014: their names are included in the US National Inventors Hall of Fame (Inventors Hall of Fame).
For his contribution and achievements in cinema, Hedy Lamarr was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
And on the birthday of the actress - November 9 - they celebrate Inventor's Day in German-speaking countries.
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