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This listing is for an 8x10 size picture of actress Hedy Lamarr.

Hedy Lamarr (November 9, 1913 - January 19, 2000) was an actress and communications technology innovator. She was known for her great beauty on camera, and also for co-inventing 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, on November 9, 1913, and died in 2000 in Altamonte Springs, Florida (near Orlando, Orange County, Florida) of natural causes at the age of 86.

While married to her first husband, Friedrich Mandl, aka Fritz Mandl, an arms manufacturer, 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 Nazi friends and finally escaped to London by drugging him and the French maid he had hired to spy on her. Ironically, Mandl was from a Jewish background. Whether the Nazis ever knew about Mandl's 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 he 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 sparked by her desire to do anything in her power to help see Nazism defeated.

She met Louis B. Mayer 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 (1933), 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 nude through the woods, gave the film notoriety. She also gained notoriety as one of the first actresses to bare her breasts 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."

In Hollywood, she appeared in many films, usually cast as glamorous and seductive, including Algiers (1938), White Cargo, and Tortilla Flat (both 1942), based on the novel by John Steinbeck. In 1941 she was cast alongside two other Hollywood beauties Lana Turner and Judy Garland in a musical extravaganza Ziegfeld Girl (1941), Her biggest success came in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949) with Victor Mature as the Biblical strongman. Unfortunately, she was more used for her stunning exotic beauty than her ability as an actress.

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 U.S. patent #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 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. It had expired by the time the U.S. military barely began using this system after 1962. It took electronics technology a long time to catch up with the concept.

Lamarr's frequency-hopping technology served as the basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology used in devices ranging from cordless telephones 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 she was told that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell War Bonds. She once raised $7,000,000 at just one event.

In 2003, the Boeing corporation 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.

In 2005, the first Inventor's Day in Germany was held in her honor on November 9, on what would have been her 92nd birthday.

Marriages

Lamarr 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 sympathizer who had become close to Prince Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg, the deposed Fascist Austrian Vice-Chancellor. Mandl fled to Brazil and later to 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 he served a prison sentence there, too.

Gene Markey (died 1980), screenwriter and producer, married 1939–41; son (adopted), James Lamarr Markey (b. 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 he was married to the actress Joan Bennett, whose daughter, Diane Bennett Fox, he adopted and gave his surname. He was father of her daughter Melinda.

John Loder (né John Muir Lowe, 1899–1989), actor, married 1943–47; two children: Anthony Loder (b. 1947) and Denise Loder (b. 1945). Loder adopted Hedi's son, James Lamarr Markey, and gave him his surname. 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 grandchildren of Lamarr, all of whom carry Lamarr as their middle name: Timothy, Ronald, Nadine, and Susan.

Ernest "Ted" Stauffer, nightclub owner, restaurateur, and former bandleader, married 1951–52.

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

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

Questionable anecdotes

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

Lamarr later sued the publisher claiming that many of the anecdotes in the book 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 followed 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. In one hilarious scene, one character even warns another that Hedy would sue. Brooks says they settled out of court for a small sum. In 1965 Lamarr made headlines for being arrested for shoplifting; charges were eventually dropped. This bizarre situation played out again in 1991.

In 1998, a vector illustration of Lamarr's face was used by Corel Corporation on the packaging and in the publicity for its CorelDraw 8 software. Lamarr sued Corel for damages relating to unauthorized use of her likeness. The case was resolved in 1999 and settled out-of-court for an undisclosed sum, under terms that allowed Corel five years of exclusive rights to the image.

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