The fate of other relatives is unknown.Įuropean film career Early work One of Hedy's paternal aunts, Frimet Pines (née Kiesler), died at Theresienstadt, a hybrid concentration camp and ghetto, during the Holocaust. Gertrude Kiesler later became an American citizen (Despite her conversion, Gertrude Kiesler put "Hebrew" as her race on her petition for naturalization, a term that had been frequently used in Europe). After the Anschluss, she helped get her mother, Gertrude, out of Austria, via Canada to the United States. 7m>05s–8m00s Young Hedy attended a private school, where she received piano, ballet, language and natural sciences lessons. She also began to associate invention with her father, who would take her out on walks, explaining how various technologies in society functioned. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. : 8Īs a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film. She had converted to Catholicism and was described as a "practicing Christian" who raised her daughter as a Christian, although Hedy was not formally baptized at the time. Trude, her mother, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Hungarian Jewish family. Her father was born to a Galician Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a bank director at the Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (née Lichtwitz 1894–1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880–1935). This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi. Īt the beginning of World War II, she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers.
She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
She also acted on television before the release of her final film, The Female Animal (1958). Her greatest success was as Delilah in Cecil B. Her MGM films include Lady of the Tropics (1939), Boom Town (1940), H.M. She became a film star with her performance in Algiers (1938).
Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. Traveling to London, she met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B.
Īfter a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. Hedy Lamarr ( / ˈ h eɪ d i/ born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler Novem – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor.