1914-2000
Who Was Hedy Lamarr?
Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-American actor during Hollywood’s Golden Age, as well as a skilled inventor. She starred in such films as Tortilla Flat, Lady of the Tropics, Boom Town, and Samson and Delilah. Lamarr also co-invented an early technique for spread spectrum communications—the key to many modern wireless communications. A recluse later in life, Lamarr died in her Florida home in 2000 at age 85.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Hedwig Maria Kiesler
BORN: November 9, 1914
BIRTHPLACE: Vienna, Austria
DIED: January 19, 2000
SPOUSES: Fritz Mandl (1933-1937), Gene Markey (1939-1941), John Loder (1943-1947), Teddy Stauffer (1951-1952), W. Howard Lee (1953-1960), and Lewis J. Boies (1963-1965)
CHILDREN: James, Denise, and Anthony
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Scorpio
Early Life
Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on November 9, 1914, in Vienna, Austria. The only child of Ukrainian and Hungarian Jewish parents, Lamarr grew up in an affluent household in Vienna. Her father, Emil Kiesler, was a banker, and her mother, Gertrud Kiesler, was a concert pianist.
Lamarr took an interest in both acting and inventing at an early age. At 5 years old, she disassembled her music box to understand how it worked and often talked with her father about the mechanics of cars and other machinery. When she was 12, Lamarr won her first beauty competition, and at age 16, she enrolled in drama school in Berlin, where she was discovered by director Max Reinhardt. She appeared in her first film, a German feature called Geld auf der Straße (Money on the Street), in 1930 and soon gained international notice in 1933 with her role in the sexually charged Czech film Ecstasy.
By this point, Lamarr had married Fritz Mandl, a wealthy Austrian munitions manufacturer who sold arms to the Nazis, and converted to Catholicism to escape persecution. Mandl was controlling and disapproved of her acting career. He was so scandalized by her performance in Ecstasy that he made a concerted effort to buy and destroy every copy of the film, spending a large amount of money in the process.
After her unhappy marriage to Mandl ended, Lamarr fled to the United States in 1937 and signed a contract with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio in Hollywood under the name Hedy Lamarr. Upon the release of her first American film, Algiers, co-starring Charles Boyer, in 1938, she became an immediate box-office sensation.
Film Career
Dubbed “the most beautiful woman in the world,” Lamarr quickly became one of Hollywood's leading ladies, starring in a number of well-received films during the 1930s and 1940s. She was often cast as a mysterious woman of beauty, mostly playing either an exotic seductress or femme fatale.
Lamarr played the former in 1939’s Lady of the Tropics, co-starring Robert Taylor, before starring as a sophisticated businesswoman in the 1940 blockbuster Boom Town with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. Lamarr appeared as a showgirl alongside Judy Garland in 1941’s Ziegfield Girl and later teamed up with Tracy again for the 1942 romantic comedy Tortilla Flat. Other notables films of the era include White Cargo (1942) and Experiment Perilous (1944).
After leaving MGM, Lamarr founded her own production company, Mars Film Corporation, in 1945, producing and starring in the films The Strange Woman (1946) and Dishonored Lady (1947). But her biggest commercial success was the 1949 biblical epic Samson and Delilah, which was also the actor’s first film in technicolor.
Lamarr's film career began to decline in the 1950s, struggling to find the same type roles that brought her earlier success. Her demand for better roles, as well as her tumultuous personal life, earned her the reputation of being “difficult” among studio heads. She appeared in her final, The Female Animal, in 1958.
Inventions
During the heyday of her career, Lamarr earned recognition in a field quite different from entertainment. In 1942, she and her friend, the composer George Antheil, received a patent for an idea of a radio signaling device, or “Secret Communications System,” which was a means of changing radio frequencies to keep enemies from decoding messages. Originally designed to defeat the German Nazis, the system became an important step in the development of technology to maintain the security of both military communications and cellular phones.
Lamarr wasn't instantly recognized for her communications invention since its wide-ranging impact wasn't understood until decades later. However, in 1997, Lamarr and Antheil were honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Pioneer Award, and that same year Lamarr became the first female to receive the BULBIE™ Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, considered the “Oscars” of inventing. In her lifetime, Lamarr also developed a prototype for an improved traffic light, as well as a tissue box attachment to discard used tissues.
Later Years
After quitting acting, Lamarr lived an increasingly reclusive life. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1953 and later began working on an autobiography in the mid-1960s with two ghostwriters. Controversy ensued, however, when Lamarr sued to stop the publication of the novel, calling it “false, vulgar, and salacious.” A judge dismissed the lawsuit in September 1966, and the book, Ecstasy and Me, became a best-seller. It was around this time that she was first arrested for shoplifting, with a second arrest later happening in 1991, though neither resulted in a conviction.
Though her struggle with substance abuse began in her Hollywoods, Lamarr’s crippling addiction to meth worsened in the 1960’s, becoming a patient of physician Max Jacobson, also known as Dr. Feelgood, who prescribed amphetamines to celebrities. In addition to drugs, Lamarr became obsessed with plastic surgery, undergoing several poorly executed operations that left her unrecognizable, leading her to withdraw from public life.
Six Marriages and Children
Lamarr was married and divorced six times. After divorcing her first husband, Fritz Mandl, in 1937, she married screenwriter and producer Gene Markey in 1939, with whom she supposedly adopted a son named James. It was later discovered, however, that James was her biological child with third husband, British actor John Loder, who she married in 1943. She went on to have two more children with Loder, welcoming their daughter Denise in 1945, followed by their second son, Anthony, in 1947. Lamarr and Loder divorced the same year.
Following a brief marriage to musician Teddy Stauffer from 1951 to 1952, she embarked on her longest marriage to oil executive W. Howard Lee. Lamarr and Lee developed Villa Lamarr, a ski resort in Aspen, Colorado, before divorcing in 1960. She then married her divorce lawyer, Lewis J. Boies in 1963, but the marriage lasted only two years.
Lamarr had a strained relationship with her children. In addition to pretending James was adopted, she sent him away to boarding school when he was 12 and became estranged from him. Lamarr faired better with her other kids, though their time together was not without turbulence. Ultimately, Denise and Anthony were involved in her estate, while James was left out her will entirely.
Death
On January 19, 2000, Lamarr died of congestive heart failure in Casselberry, Florida, at the age of 85. Though her son, James, contested her will, he was unsuccessful.
In 2017, the documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story shed a light on the Hollywood starlet and unlikely inventor’s life. Along with delving into her pioneering technological work, the film explores her extensive film career, as well as her struggles with addiction and plastic surgery.
Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us!
The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us
Catherine Caruso joined the Biography.com staff in August 2024, having previously worked as a freelance journalist for several years. She is a graduate of Syracuse University, where she studied English literature. When she’s not working on a new story, you can find her reading, hitting the gym, or watching too much TV.
