Few Hollywood actresses have the kind of influential career that the inimitable Hedy Lamarrhad. Yes, she was beautiful. Yes, she was talented. Yes, she even went controversially nude! But that's not all she did. When I say she had one of the most influential careers of any Hollywood actress in history, I mean it point-blank and period. She acted, but she also worked as an inventor whose work on radio communication helped invent modern WiFi and radio technology. What?! It's true! This starlet who showed her bare breasts also helped to invent the very thing I'm using right not to write this. In a word? She's skincredible!
Viennese vixen Hedy was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Austria in 1914. As a Jewish woman in early Nazi-occupied Europe, she was desperate to escape both her country and her controlling marriage. She began acting in the 1930s and it was only in 1933 when she starred in the pre-code foreign film Ecstasy as Eva Hermann. In this Czech film, she plays a trophy wife who realizes she is stuck in a loveless marriage. She runs away and has an affair and ultimately winds up leaving her lover to go off on her own. This movie was wildly ahead of its time for having a female protagonist that made her own decisions and took off her own clothes.
This movie is often misidentified to be the first film to show onscreen nudity, but we know that that's not true. Still, the nudity was pretty explicit and at the very least the movie makes sex a plot point which was new. The movie was banned in many European countries at the time not because of its nudity, but because of its Jewish-affiliations. Shortly after filming this movie and dealing with early on-coming Nazi occupation, she made her escape to the United States by drugging a maid in her house, stealing her uniform, and used this disguise to head to the train station where she fled to Paris and then took a boat to London. This is all true! While in London, she coincidentally met with Louis B. Mayer who happened to be in England at the same time. They had a meeting, despite the fact that hewarned that no one in Hollywood would take her seriously since she had done nudity, but she didn't care. She had to try! She boarded the same ocean-liner as Mayor by posing as the governess of a teenage violin prodigy on the ship. Mayor was very impressed by this real-life acting job, so he offered her a contract at MGM. She made it to the United States where she could be as free a woman as she played in Ecstasy.
Her first Hollywood film was immediately after Ecstasy, which had been banned in the US for a few years due to its sex-filled plot.She starred in much-more Hollywood-friendly films like Algiers, Ziegfeld Girl, and Samson and Delilah.In 28 years, she starred in 30 films. She was dubbed "The Most Beautiful Woman", but this beauty had big brains. Her IQ was allegedly 140.When the war got worse, she wanted to put that big brain of hers to use to help her adopted country win.
In 1941, she developed frequency-hopping technology that would become the early model for wifi, GPS, and Bluetooth technology. She did this after joining a group of artists who wanted to help the war effort by putting their creative minds to use in The National InventorsCouncil. Heddy suggested setting up a remote control torpedo using wireless radio transmissions which would constantly shift frequency, making it more difficultto intercept. The idea was inspired by the way that player pianos worked. This was intended to help the allies win World War II, but it wound up helping and changing the entire world as we know it.
This kind of twist to the glamazon's life seems too good to be true, but it IS true. After she submitted her patent, she went back to Hollywood to act in a few more films. The government didn't end up making her torpedo, but she submitted her work to themilitary in the hopes that it could help with something. It seemed for a while like she would disappear into obscurity with her final film being made in 1958, but scientists later figured out how to modify her patent in the late 1950s.The military used her patent for several classified projects for decades until it was unclassified and Hedy became aware that her work was being used all over the world (and she complained she didn't even get a thank you). In the 1990s, the cell phone industry finally gave Hedy Lamarr credit for the invention that was quickly changing the worldand one company finally started sending her residuals. Finally, she was getting credit for being beautiful AND brainy.
Isn't this story crazy? It's just one of many fascinating stories about early Hollywood actresses who also happened to be pioneers in onscreen nudity. You can learn a lot more about this in the new documentary Skin. Watch a sneaky scene from the film here which also features Hedy herself:
