Korean artist Nam June Paik’s famous quote matched nobody better than Austrian-US actress Hedy Lamarr. She was one of those few people who seemed to have everything – exquisite beauty, money, and fame. Looking closer she had even more, intelligence, indeed genius, down-to-earth realism – and also some quite bad character traits. At times she must have felt being on top of the world, but the world was not able to grasp her in full.
“Exceptional beauty is an attribute which defines its possessor’s life”. This in another very true quote, this time from biographer Anne de Courcy about her subject Diana Mosely. It fits all extremely beautiful people, male or female. It certainly was true for Hedy Lamarr. As beauty can and will be seen, it cannot be hidden except through mutilation, masks (e.g. a nun’s habit), living the life of a recluse or old age. It is there and the first thing every counterpart notes.
Beauty inspires awe, envy, adulation, and the wish, to be close to the source of beauty. Be that through friendship, marriage, or else. It is the same when you are surrounded by objects of beauty or when you are in a city like Paris. Beauty seems to rub off on its surroundings. Beauty drowns out everything else.
The difference lies in whether the adored beauty is a subject (person) or an object (town or other). An object of stone does not react. A beautiful person starts a dialogue with his / her admirers. Few beautiful people can handle that dialogue well, especially as they grow older. In the case of an actress, being too beautiful rarely brings character roles. Few actresses could (or can, not much has changed in that regard) make the transition from being extremely desirable in a physical way to being an attractive wholesome person to the public.
Hedy Lamarr was born as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria in 1914. She was the daughter of a well-to-do family with artistic ambitions. She got a certain fame for having the first nude scenes in continental European Cinema, in 1933, in the movie “Ekstase”. The scandal was huge, the parents unhappy, the young lady (18 years) married of to an older, very rich Austrian arms manufacturer, Fritz Mandl (33 years). Her flight from him in 1937 to the waiting arms of Hollywood could have been a movie plot – she took money and jewellery with her. Due to that, her start in Hollywood was not the typical one of a penniless young girl. In 1938 she had her first star-role in “Algiers” and was the toast of Hollywood. The 1937 original animated Disney classic “Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs” has a Snow White allegedly modelled after her looks. Is more needed to become a legend?
She married and divorced and remarried again, 6 times over the years. She had 3 children, 1 of them becoming the guardian of her legacy, Anthony Loder. She stopped making movies in the 1960s and mainly got bad press for supposed shoplifting, an autobiography that she denied having written, face-lifts, court cased etc. She avoided the eye of the public afterwards, moved to Florida and lived there till her death in the year 2000. Hedy Lamarr was certainly not an easy character when she grew older.
Her most important invention, a frequency hopping system that allowed secret communication was made during her best time, together with composer George Antheil shorty after the start of the 2nd World War, in the early 1940s. Drawing from their experience in music (they tried to synchronize 16 pianos for a piece of music that he had composed), they envisioned a possibility to synchronize a jump in radio frequencies and the possibility to control them. For a non-technician this is difficult to understand – let us just say that what Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil invented is today accepted as the basis of Wifi, GPS, Bluetooth etc.
The patent was granted in 1942 with the no. US2292387A. You can easily google it, today there is lots of information about in the internet, including the original handwritten patent application. The patent was not used for the intended torpedo control system of the US Navy that Hedy Lamarr and Georg Antheil had in mind. It was quite forgotten till the 1990s, when a few people, notably David R Hughes made her achievements public. In 1997 she got the Pioneer Award of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EEF) and after her death she became part of the American National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. The frequency hopping system was not her only invention, but her most famous one. It was also probably the only one patented and therefore without any doubt hers.
Hedy Lamarr was lucky enough to get some of the acknowledgment, if not money, for her invention during her lifetime. Lady Luck stayed with her, compared to all those others who only became world famous after their deaths.
She was rich, famous, beautiful, had had a full life and left a legacy as one of the best technology minds of the 20th century. Seeing pictures of Hedy Lamarr, that exquisite beauty, it is still difficult reuniting it with Hedy Lamarr, the inventor. Too much! All that united in one person – for being that close to the sun, Hedy Lamarr has done a great job living her life.
All rights to the books belong to:
Foerster, Jochen & Loder, Anthony: Hedy Darling, Hollywood-Ikone. Technik-Pionierin. Gefallener Stern. Das Filmreife Leben der Hedy Lamarr, erzaehlt von ihrem Sohn, 2012, Ankerherz Verlag GmbH, Hollenstedt, ISBN: 978-3-940138-25-5
Roy, William & Dorange, Sylvain, Hedy Lamarr, Wienerin, Hollywoodstar, Erfinderin, 2018, original title: La plus belle femme du monde: Incredible Life of Hedy Lamarr, this edition published by bahoe books 2024 Fischerstiege 4-8/2/3, A-1010 Wien, ISBN: 978-3-903478-20-6
Shearer, Stephen Michael: Beautiful, The Life of Hedy Lamarr, 2010, published by St. Martin’s Press, printed in the United States of America, ISBN: 978-0-312-55098-1
The patent by Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil can be found in Wikimedia Commons and The Smithsonian Institution, National Archives and Records Administration. It can be used under the Smithsonian Terms of Use
Quote on Beauty:
De Courcy, Anne: Diana Mosely, Mitford Beauty, British Fascist, Hitler’s Angel, 2003, page 1, published by Chatto & Windus, Random House, London, this edition printed in the United States of America by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022, ISBN: 0-06-056532-2
Quote by Nam June Paik:
The quote is from 1993 according to the result after googling it, e.g. www.littlethingsforyou.com/products/nam-june-paik-when-too-perfect, 13th of April 2025