Hedy Lamarr: More Than Beauty

By Karen Burroughs Hannsberry

Hedy Lamarr was once quoted as saying, "Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."

She also said, “I don’t have to work on ideas – they come naturally.” 

There’s no denying that Lamarr was one of the most glamorous actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood. But she was also incredibly creative – a trailblazer with a keen intellect and an inventive spirit. 

And a veritable boatload of ideas.

Born Hedwig Kiesler in 1914 (one of her biographers, Ruth Barton, said she later added two middle names, Eva Maria), Hedy demonstrated her interest in performing at an early age, appearing in school plays and musical festivals in her native Vienna. She debuted on screen as an extra in a 1931 Viennese film, but just two years later, she landed the lead in the picture that would put her name on the map: Ecstasy. In this feature, filmed in Czechoslovakia, Hedy played a sexually unfulfilled bride who finds her awakening in the arms of younger man. The film was a sensation, as it not only contained scenes of Hedy in the nude, but also a close-up of her face experiencing the emotion of the film’s title. The picture was denounced by Pope Pious XI, condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, and blocked by U.S. Customs officials for being “dangerously indecent,” but it turned Hedy into a star. (By all accounts, her parents were none too thrilled, however: “When I came back to Vienna,” Hedy recalled later, “My father wanted to kill me, practically.”)

Hedy was introduced to American audiences in the late 1930s, after fleeing Vienna (and the first of her six husbands), and following a serendipitous meeting with MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer in London. She signed a seven-year MGM contract, got a new last name (after silent screen star Barbara LaMarr), and was cast opposite Charles Boyer in Algiers (1938). The picture was a hit – earning four Academy Award nominations – and the critics were bowled over by Hedy, with the reviewer for Daily Variety praising her “quiet but provocative and intense projection allure” and Time’s critic predicting that Hedy’s “coming may well presage a renewal of the sultry cinema of Garbo and Dietrich.”

This auspicious beginning was followed by a number of memorable films, including Boom Town (1940) with Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Claudette Colbert; Ziegfeld Girl (1941), co-starring Judy Garland and Lana Turner; one of my personal favorites, H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), where she was the girl ideal for the title character; White Cargo (1942), where she famously played a native girl named Tondelayo; and Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1946), the most successful film of her career.

During these years, however, Hedy was occupied by more than just her cinematic pursuits; she had a variety of interests, including chess, playing the piano and, most importantly, developing her own inventions. She had a drafting table dedicated to inventing in her home, a smaller-scale model in her MGM dressing room, and a vast collection of books on engineering. Her creations included a light-up collar that would allow dogs to be easily seen in the dark, a small receptacle attached to a tissue box for holding used tissues, a chair that allowed a person to swivel in and out of the shower, and a dissolvable cube that could be added to water and result in a cola-type drink. (The latter, she laughingly recalled in a 1990 interview with Forbes magazine writer Fleming Meeks, was “one of my boo-boos.”) She even created a new wing shape for the airplanes owned by her friend, billionaire Howard Hughes, to make them fly faster, a design that was inspired by pictures of bird wings and fish fins. “I can't explain, I have an inventive mind,” Hedy told Meeks. “Inventions are easy for me to do.”

But Hedy’s best-known and most influential invention was developed in the early 1940s with composer George Antheil. Fueled by her desire to help in the war effort, Hedy worked with Antheil on a “frequency hopping” system that would prevent radio-controlled torpedoes from being intercepted by the enemy and set off course before reaching their target. The invention used the synchronization concept of player pianos, for which Antheil had written several songs: “The idea was mine, but the implementation was George’s,” Hedy said later. The two applied for a patent, with the actress using her maiden name and the last name of her second husband, screenwriter Gene Markey, and several papers carried the news – a Hollywood Citizen-News headline declared, “Hedy Comes Up with Idea for U.S. Defense,” and a New York Times article revealed that a member of the National Inventors Council “classed Miss Lamarr’s invention as in the ‘red-hot’ category.” 

The patent for Hedy and Antheil’s invention (officially titled a “Secret Communication System”) was approved by the U.S. Patent Office in August 1942. Although the system was shared with the U.S. Navy, though, it was rejected and went unused in the war; reportedly, the Navy informed the actress that her services would be better utilized by raising funds – never one to back down from a challenge, she went on to sell the equivalent of $343 million in war bonds in 2025 dollars. The patent eventually lapsed and years later, an updated version of the frequency-hopping design was used on U.S. Navy ships; the concept would ultimately serve as the foundation for such communication systems as Bluetooth and GPS, as well as for military satellites.

Back on screen, Hedy’s MGM contract expired in 1945. Often unhappy with the roles she’d been given, she was determined to take matters into her own hands and teamed up with Jack Chertok (who’d produced film shorts at MGM since the 1930s) to form an independent production company called Mars Productions, Inc. For the first film under their new company, Hedy and Chertok selected The Strange Woman (1946), based on a successful 1941 novel by Ben Ames Wiliams (who would go on to pen Leave Her to Heaven a few years later). Hedy expressed her excitement over the picture in an interview with famed gossip columnist Louella Parsons, saying that it gave her “the chance [she had] been waiting for so long.” Hedy would make only two more films under the Mars Productions banner – Dishonored Lady (1947), co-starring the third of her six husbands, John Loder, and The Loves of Three Kings (1954), filmed in Italy – before leaving her producing days behind. Still, as observed by historian and author Robert Osborne in the 2017 documentary on Hedy’s life, Bombshell, her efforts were laudable: “I don’t really recall anybody except Hedy,” Osborne said, “[who] went out and actually produced a movie. It was very unusual in 1946.”

With her screen career on the wane (she would make her last screen appearance in 1958), Hedy’s innovative spirit continued to manifest itself. In the 1950s, she married her fifth husband, Texas oilman W. Howard Lee, and after a vacation trip to Aspen, Colorado, she got an idea. “When I went through Aspen, there was nobody there,” she told Fleming Meeks. “Nothing. Just a little store and a few houses. And I said this could be a very wonderful ski resort.” Hedy and her husband designed and developed Villa Lamarr, and although the Austrian-style chalet was torn down years later, it is credited with helping to create the overall character of the city.

Hedy was even reportedly a pioneer in the field of cosmetic surgery, which she started undergoing when she was in her 40s. In the Bombshell documentary, a friend of Hedy’s states that Hedy came up with suggestions for her surgeon that, at that time, were not being done. The documentary also quotes a plastic surgeon who confirms, “She was really one of the first women out there saying, ‘Why isn’t this possible? Why can’t we do this?’”

Sadly, Hedy encountered a series of unhappy experiences in her later years, including the loss of Villa Lamarr in her divorce from Howard Lee, struggles with substance abuse, a highly publicized arrest for shoplifting, several unsuccessful plastic surgeries and, reportedly, a marked decrease in her income – and because her patent expired in 1959, she never received any financial compensation for the frequency hopping invention. She became increasingly reclusive, staying in touch with friends and family via the telephone, but seldom being seen in public. 

In January 2000, Hedy died in her sleep at the age of 85, but as fortune would have it, she did live to see some recognition of her contribution. As early as the mid-1970s, there had been rumblings about the frequency hopping invention – the Los Angeles Times ran a small article in 1974 spotlighting celebrity inventors, including Hedy, but there was no information on the use of the patent. Then, in 1989, an Orlando Sentinel article on the patent called Hedy a “war hero,” but the piece didn’t garner much notice. Things changed in 1990, though, when Forbes magazine printed Fleming Meeks’s article on Hedy, finally bringing widespread attention to her innovations. Several years later, Hedy and Antheil received a number of awards, including the Pioneer Award in 1997 from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The award was accepted by Hedy’s son, Anthony Loder (“She just didn’t want to be seen,” Loder said.). Footage of the event was included in the Bombshell documentary, and Loder plays a tape recording for the audience from his mother expressing her thanks: “I’m happy that this invention has been so successful. I appreciate your acknowledgement of you honoring me, and that it was not done in vain.” In 1998, Hedy was awarded the Viktor Kaplan Medal of the Austrian Association of Patent Holders and Inventors, and both Hedy and Antheil (who died in 1959) were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Today, print articles, podcast episodes, and YouTube videos are likely to make mention of Hedy’s striking beauty, the scandalous film that introduced her to the world, and her reclusive later years – but more significantly, the coverage is almost certain to also highlight her intelligence, creativity, and the invention that wound up having such a far-reaching impact on our world today. 

As Robert Osborne said in her documentary, “She did make her mark. It’s the one thing she did for other people that she’s going to be long, long remembered for.”

---

Karen Burroughs Hannsberry is the author of two books on film noir, Femme Noir: The Bad Girls of Film and Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir. She is also the editor-in-chief of The Dark Pages film noir newsletter, founded in 2004. She can be found on X at @thedarkpages.

Film Masters plans to release newly restored prints of a pair of Hedy Lamarr films in 2025 — stay tuned!