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Hedy Lamarr (November 9, 1913–January 19,
2000) was an actor|actress and communications
innovator. She was known as The Most Beautiful
Woman In Films and also as a co-inventor of the
first form of spread spectrum, a key to modern
wireless communication.

==Life==
Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler to a
Jewish family in Vienna, Austria in 1913, and died
in 2000 in Altamonte Springs, Florida.

While married to her first husband, Friedrich
Mandl, aka 'Fritz Mandl', an arms manufacturer who
was also of Jewish descent, she socialized with
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. She also became
educated technically in his trade. Mandl was
obsessed with his wife and never let her out of
his sight. She hated him and his Nazism|Nazi
friends and finally escaped to London by drugging
him and the French maid he had hired to spy on
her. Ironically, Mandl was Jewish. Whether the
Nazis ever knew about Mandl and Lamarr's Jewish
origins has been debated by historians; Friedrich
Mandl came from an extremely assimilated family
and it appears that he overtly hid his Jewish
origins and converted to Christianity under
evident pressure. Many also say that Lamarr's
co-invention of spread spectrum as a potential
World War II military application was fueled by
her desire to do anything in her power to help see
Nazi Germany defeated.

She met Louis B. Mayer of MGM in London. He hired
her and changed her name to Hedy Lamarr, the
surname in homage to a famously beautiful film
star of the silent era, Barbara LaMarr, who had
died of a drug overdose in 1926. She had already
appeared in several European films, including
Ecstasy (movie)|Ecstasy, in which she played a
love-hungry young wife of an indifferent old
husband. Closeups of her face in passion, and long
shots of her running naked through the woods, gave
the film notoriety. She also gained notoriety as
one of the first actresses to bare her breasts,
and in a major film.  Mandl bought up as many
copies of the film as he could possibly find, as
he objected to her nudity, as well as "the
expression on her face." 

She was also known as the "Laurence Olivier of
Orgasm".

In Hollywood, she appeared in many films, usually
cast as glamorous and seductive, including White
Cargo and Tortilla Flat (both 1942), based on the
novel by John Steinbeck. Her biggest success came
in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah
(movie)|Samson and Delilah (1949) with Victor
Mature as the Biblical strongman.

Lamarr became a naturalized citizen of the United
States on April 10, 1953.

==Frequency-hopped spread spectrum invention==
Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil received
patent number 2,292,387 for their "Secret
Communication System." This early version of
frequency hopping used a piano roll to change
between 88 frequencies and was intended to make
radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to
detect or to jam. The patent was little-known
until recently because Lamarr applied for it under
her then-married name of Hedy Kiesler Markey.
Neither Lamarr nor Antheil made any money from the
patent. The U.S. military did not adopt this
technology until 1962.

Lamarr's frequency hopping technology served as
the basis for modern spread-spectrum communication
 technology used in devices ranging from cordless
phones to WiFi internet connections.  In 1997, the
two of them received an EFF Pioneer Award for the
invention.

Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors
Council but was told she could better help the war
effort by using her celebrity status to sell war
bonds. She once raised $7,000,000 at one event.

In 2003 Boeing ran a series of recruitment ads
featuring Hedy Lamarr as a woman of science. No
reference to her film career was made in the ads.

==Marriages==
The actress was married to:

Friedrich (Fritz) Mandl (1900-1977), married
1933-37; chairman of Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik,
a leading armaments firm founded by his father,
Alexander Mandl. In 1938, when his property was
seized by the Austrian government, Mandl, although
also of Jewish descent, was a Nazi factotum who
had become close to Prince Ernst Ruediger von
Stahremberg, the deposed Fascist Austrian
Vice-Chancellor, fled to Brazil and later
Argentina, where he became a citizen and
remarried. He also became an advisor to Juan
Perón and a film producer whose leading ladies
included the future Eva Perón. He also founded a
new company, an airplane factory called "Industria
Metalúrgica y Plástica Argentina", and served a
prison sentence.

Gene Markey (died 1980), screenwriter and
producer, married 1939-41; son (adopted), James
Lamarr Markey (1939-). When Lamarr and Markey
divorced -- she claimed they had only spent four
evenings alone together in their marriage -- the
judge advised her to get to know any future
husband more than the four weeks she had known
Markey. Previously married to the actress Joan
Bennett (whose daughter, Diane Bennett Fox, he
adopted and gave his surname) and father of their
daughter Melinda, Markey later married Lucille
Wright (née Parker), the owner of Calumet Farm,
the thoroughbred horse farm in Kentucky.

John Loder (né John Muir Lowe, 1899-1989), actor,
married 1943-47; two children: Anthony Loder
(1947-) and Denise Loder (1945-). In 1949, Loder
married Evelyn Auffmordt (née Carolan), and in
1958, he married Alba Julia Lagomarsino. He also
had a son and a daughter by his first two
marriages to Sophie Kabel and Micheline Cheirel.
NOTE 1: Loder adopted James Lamarr Markey and gave
him his surname. Now a riverboat casino guard,
James Lamarr Loder later challenged Hedy Lamarr's
will in 2000, which did not mention him. He later
dropped his suit against the estate in exchange
for a lump-sum payment of $50,000. Loder is
married to the former Ona Minor and has four
children, all of whom carry Lamarr as their middle
name: Timothy, Ronald, Nadine, and Susan.
NOTE 2: A former Nordstrom employee, Denise Loder,
now known as Denise Loder DeLuca, lives in
Seattle.
NOTE 3: Anthony Loder is the owner of Phone USA, a
cellular-phone store in Los Angeles.

Ernest "Ted" Stauffer, nightclub owner,
restaurateur, and former bandleader, married
1951-52. He was married in 1955 to Anne Nekel
Brown.

W. Howard Lee (1909-1981), a Texas oilman, married
1953-60. In 1960, he married film star Gene
Tierney.

Lewis J. Boies (1920-), a lawyer, married 1963-65.
They were divorced after Lamarr claimed he had
threatened her with a baseball bat.

==Anecdotes==
In one story presented in her autobiography,
Ecstasy and Me, once while running from Friedrich
Mandl she slipped into a brothel and hid in an
empty room. While her husband searched the
brothel, a customer entered the room and she had
sex with the man so she could remain hidden. She
was finally successful in escaping when she hired
a new maid that looked like herself, drugged her
and used the maid's uniform as a disguise to
escape.  

Lamarr later sued the publisher claiming that many
of the anecdotes were fabricated by the ghost
writer.

According to accounts in film histories, Cecil B.
DeMille is said to have gathered the 1900 peacock
feathers that Lamarr wore on her 18-foot-train
dress in the 1949 movie Samson and Delilah
himself, having chased molting peacocks on his
ranch for the previous 10 years until he had
collected enough feathers to have the garment
made.

For her contribution to the motion picture
industry, Hedy Lamarr has a star on the Hollywood
Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd.

In an interview appended to the DVD release of
Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks claims that Hedy
Lamarr threatened to sue the producers.  He says
she believed the film's running "Hedley Lamarr"
joke infringed her right to publicity.  Mel says
they settled out of court for a small sum.

Hedy Lamarr was also the namesake for Hedy Lamarr,
the headcrab pet of Dr. Isaac Kleiner, in the 2004
computer first-person shooter, Half-Life 2.

==Quotes==
*"Any girl can be glamorous.  All you have to do
is stand still and look stupid." — Hedy
Lamarr

==Filmography==

* Money on the Street (1930)
* We Need No Money (1931)
* Storm in a Water Glass (1931)
* The Trunks of Mr. O.F. (1931)
* Ecstasy (movie)|Ecstasy (1932)
* Ecstasy (movie)|Ecstasy (1933) (French version)
* Algiers (film) (1938)
* Hollywood Goes to Town (1938) (short subject)
* Lady of the Tropics (1939)
* I Take This Woman (1940)
* Boom Town (film) (1940)
* Comrade X (1940)
* Come Live with Me (1941)
* Ziegfeld Girl (1941)
* H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941)
* Tortilla Flat (1942)
* Crossroads (1942)
* White Cargo (1942)
* Show Business at War (1943) (short subject)
* The Heavenly Body (1943)
* The Conspirators (1944)
* Experiment Perilous (1944)
* Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945)
* The Strange Woman (1946)
* Dishonored Lady (1947)
* Let's Live a Little (1948)
* Samson and Delilah (1949)
* A Lady Without Passport (1950)
* Copper Canyon (1950)
* My Favorite Spy (1951)
* The Eternal Female (1954) (unfinished)
* Loves of Three Queens (1954)
* The Story of Mankind (film) (1957)
* The Female Animal (1958)

==See also==
*List of Austrian actors
*List of Austrian Scientists
*List of Austrians

==External links==
*http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001443/ The IMDb
entry on Lamarr
*http://www.hedylamarr.org Hedy Lamarr foundation
*http://godel.ph.utexas.edu/~tonyr/spread_spectrum
.html Plausibility-The Invention of Spread
Spectrum Technology
*http://www.ncafe.com/chris/pat2/ "Secret
Communications System"
*http://www.hoxie.org/news99/senior99/hedy1.html
"Not Just Another Pretty Face"
*http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,5885,00.htm
l Screen Siren Hedy Lamarr Dies