Saturdays with the Stars: Hedy Lamarr

Each month of 2019 we will be looking at the careers of leading ladies of Classical Hollywood who were never nominated for an Academy Award as part of our "Saturdays with the Stars" series.  Last month, our focus was on Esther Williams, a former athlete who became a MGM superstar in the 1940's.  This month we turn to a Hungarian actress who also found fame at MGM a few years before Williams, but perhaps gained her greatest fame decades after with her unlikely second career as an inventor.  This month, our star is Ms. Hedy Lamarr.

Lamarr's off-screen life was always more interesting than her filmography, at least as far as most film historians who discuss her work are concerned.  Born the daughter of wealthy Hungarian Jews, she and her mother eventually headed to America as the Third Reich came to power.  Despite this, early in her life, after the breakout hit of the scandalous Ecstasy (where Lamarr purportedly appears nude and simulates an orgasm), she married Friedrich Mandl, a man who was a known business associate of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, both of whom stayed with the Mandls before Hedy fled the country, going to London in hopes of continuing her career as an actress, which she was able to do after impressing Louis B. Mayer enough to sign her to a contract at MGM.

Her career was almost entirely centered on her beauty, something Mayer cemented when he claimed she was "the world's most beautiful woman" (twenty years later, you can see that this title never left her-at the end of her being discovered on What's My Line? the entire panel started to sing "the most beautiful girl in the world").  Her first major film in America was Algiers, a huge hit for MGM that established Lamarr as a star but perhaps was also the high point of her Hollywood career artistically.  She missed out on Casablanca, which was written with her in mind, but she still had a number of hits over the next five years opposite the likes of Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Judy Garland, & Walter Pidgeon.  She ended the decade with the smash hit Samson and Delilah, but the 1950's saw her largely disappear from the screen with a series of increasingly small box office receipts, and she retired from film-making in 1957.

Lamarr had possibly the strangest second act of literally any movie star, however.  She came up with the idea of "frequency hopping" (this is getting into electrical engineering, so I'm not going to embarrass myself by trying to explain it), and gave the idea to the Navy, who initially had nothing that they could use it for, but as her creative genius soon began to be realized, the uses for it were plentiful.  Essentially, Lamarr wasn't just a famous movie star-she is also one of the pioneers of GPS and WiFi technology, something she never saw a dime for because she gave the patent over to the US government.  She went for decades without recognition for this work, and even when she finally did receive the recognition, she was too reclusive (botched plastic surgeries and time had stolen away the looks of the "most beautiful girl in the world" and she couldn't bare to have people see her this way) to accept the acknowledgement.  This is probably, thanks to movies like the recent documentary Bombshell, what Lamarr is best known for today.  But during this month, we'll go back to the time of her as a movie star, and figure out, even without the inventions, whether Hollywood had underestimated Hedy Lamarr.