Hedy Lamarr Movies and Career Information

Hedy Lamarr (pronounced /ˈhɛdi/; November 9, 1913 – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American actress. Though known primarily for her celebrity in a film career as a major contract star of MGM's "Golden Age", Lamarr was a scientist, inventor and mathematician who co-invented an early technique for spread spectrum communications, a key to many forms of wireless communication from the pre-computer age to the present day. Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, to Jewish parents Gertrud (née Lichtwitz), a pianist and Budapest native who came from the "Jewish haute bourgeoisie", and Lemberg-born Emil Kiesler, a successful bank director. She studied ballet and piano at age 10. When she worked with Max Reinhardt in Berlin, he called her the "most beautiful woman in Europe". Soon the teenage girl played major roles in German movies, alongside stars like Heinz Rühmann and Hans Moser. In early 1933 she starred in Gustav Machatý's notorious film Ecstasy, a Czechoslovak film made in Prague, in which she played the love-hungry young wife of an indifferent old husband. Closeups of her face and long shots of her running nude through the woods gave the film