Hedy Lamarr has gone down in history as the most beautiful actress of her time and the first to appear totally N- in a movie. However, Hedy Lamarr had a much brighter career in engineering.
Before Ava Gardner earned the title of "world's most beautiful animal," there was a Hollywood star whose beauty had directors, producers, and fans all agreeing: she was hands down the most beautiful woman on the planet, beyond appeal. Hedy Lamarr (Vienna, 1914 - Florida, 2000) conquered the movie mecca with unforgettable films such as "Algiers (John Cromwell, 1938), "Night in the Soul (Jacques Tourner, 1940), or the extremely famous "Samson and Dalida" ( Cecil B. DeMille, 1949).
She already said wonderful things then, for example: "Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stay willing and look stupid." Her career did not begin, however, in Hollywood, but in Berlin. Although she was a gifted intelligent girl and began engineering studies at the age of 16, at 19 she left books for the cinema and landed the leading role in "Ecstasy" (1933), the first film in cinema history where a woman appears. N-woman (her). Her director, Gustav Machaty, promised her that the cameras would record her from afar but she tricked her star into her telephoto lens through her. Against her will, her name went down in history, forever linked to that N-.
The success and controversy caused by that film, condemned by Pope Pius XI, caught the attention of businessman Friedrich Mandl, a supplier of weapons to Hitler and Mussolini. She became so obsessed with Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, (her name before Hollywood), that she forced her to marry him (he was the first of her six husbands), to the point of locking her in a mansion so that she won't run away from it. There she resumed her engineering studies, updated herself on weapons technology thanks to the documentation and books from her husband's library, and hatched her escape plan. With the help of her assistant, with whom she had a romantic relationship, she arranged for a car to take her to Paris (she had to get out of a restaurant where Mandl took her to dinner through her bathroom window). She went from Paris to London and there, in a stroke of luck, she met Louis B. Mayer, owner of the Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) studios in Hollywood, with whom she left for the new world (and the snow her life).
Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler landed in New York with a seven-year contract with the biggest movie studio of the moment and a new name: Hedy Lamarr. However, her acting career could never fully satisfy her prodigious intellect, which is why she spent sleepless nights researching and inventing engineering projects that, until not too long ago, remained in the spotlight. darkness. A documentary released in 2017, "Bombshell", directed by Alexandra Dean and available on the streaming platform Filmin since May 6, brought to light the inventions of Hedy Lamarr and her contribution to science and the defeat of the Nazi army in World War II. Among them stands out a remote-controlled torpedo detection system inspired by a musical principle, which she developed together with composer George Antheil.
In addition, she Hedy Lamarr was the first to conceive a spread spectrum theory that is today considered the precursor of Wi-Fi. The US military kept her discoveries secret but put them to use in the Cuban Missile Crisis. They didn't bear fruit in civil engineering until the 1980s, luckily while the actress was alive and she was able to enjoy the fruit of her intellectual talent. Indeed: if today we are browsing and watching streaming movies we owe it, in part, to her. For this reason, since 2005, Hedy Lamarr's birthday (November 9) has been celebrated as Inventor's Day in Austria, Switzerland, and, Germany, and in 2014 her name was incorporated into the United States Inventors Hall of Fame.
