Hedy Lamarr

Born in Vienna in 1913 of well-placed Jewish parents, young beauty Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler studied piano and ballet before becoming a film sensation in Germany. In 1933, she starred in the controversial film “Ecstasy”, notorious for including scenes of her with full frontal nudity as well as a much-talked about close-up of her exquisite face during orgasm (though she always maintained it was “method acting”…)

On the eve of WWII, young Hedwig fled to Paris, and then London, where she met Louis B. Mayer. The movie mogul changed her name to Hedy Lamarr, and the rest was the most glamorous of Hollywood history.

In films like “White Cargo”, “Boom Town”, “Algiers”, and “Ziegfeld Girl”, Hedy Lamarr lit up screens with her intense presence, a unique combination of smoldering dark sex appeal and a sort of fragile tenderness. Probably her most famous role was as the ultimate bad girl, Delilah, in Cecil B. DeMille’s “Samson and Delilah”—after that, it was an unexpected turn to comedy along with Bob Hope in “My Favorite Spy”.

Much has been made of Hedy Lamarr’s open life of sexuality—she apparently had a very healthy sexual appetite that she pursued with many men and even some women- but most of those rumors are unsubstantiated.

Either way, and despite a troubled later life, Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood starlet who went her own way, an individualist who paid only the slightest of attentions to the standards of her time. And she was without question one of the most beautiful women in the history of film.