Hedy Lamarr: Movie Star & Technological Innovator

[moira finnie]

I thought others might enjoy this post from Salon.com about Hedy Lamarr's fascinating role in creating the technology that most of us use each day:

“Hedy’s Folly”: The movie star behind your cellphone

[Rita Hayworth]

Moira,

Thanks for sharing this with us. I had read about this in the past and Hedy Lamarr should had deserved better! I have certainty admire her a lot. Not only she is breathtaking beautiful, but that lovely woman is way ahead of her time - literally!

I will be definitively getting that book.

[charliechaplinfan]

I read a biography of her a while ago. What an enigma of a woman, obviously very bright but somewhat unfulfilled and stunningly beautiful. Brains and beauty, you think that would make any girl happy but in her case I'm not sure it did.

[intothenitrate]

I heard about this on a quiz show on public radio earlier this year, and have been wanting to learn more ever since. Looking forward to checking it out.

I also heard (on that same station) that Theda Bera was a math whiz!

[charliechaplinfan]

I didn't know about the maths whizz but she was known as being quite clever.

[moira finnie]

When she wasn't inventing stuff, Hedy Lamarr used to punch in regularly at MGM, where she made movies. Perhaps you've heard. Tonight brings a pair of Hedy Lamarr's most entertaining movies on TCM:

8:00 PM (ET)
White Cargo (1942)
A sultry native woman ignites the passions of workers on a rubber plantation. Walter Pidgeon, Richard Carlson, Frank Morgan play the men who are toyed with (and sometimes destroyed) by Lamarr.


Above: Hedy, making time with Walter Pidgeon in White Cargo. He doesn't melt as quickly as the other Caucasian men-sicles. This stuff was old-fashioned fun even when they made the first version of the story in 1929--though I think they should have kept the original title of Ida Vera Simonton's novel, "Hell's Playground."

9:45 PM (ET)
H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941)
Hedy Lamarr, Robert Young, Ruth Hussey.
Lamarr creates one of the few nuanced characters she ever had a chance to play. Young is very good as a man questioning his choices. A real fave of many SSO members and a rare film that suggested that there might be more to a woman's life than hearth and home.

[GaryCooper]

[GaryCooper]