She was 19, she was one of the most beautiful women in the world, she was from Vienna. In “Extase”, a scandalous film (1933), she appeared naked, as if under the influence of a latent orgasm. The effect was obtained by an unfair means: the director, Gustav Machatý, stabbed his buttocks with pins. Hedy Lamarr later married Friedrich Mandl, a gun dealer who did business with Mussolini and Hitler. Mandl tried to buy out “Ecstasy”, thereby provoking unexpected publicity. His wife escaped him in a perfectly romantic way: locked up in her husband’s castle, she drugged a servant and fled through the bathroom window at dinner time.
She invented a communication system used in the GPS
She emerged in Hollywood where she was seen in “The Dancer of the Follies Ziegfeld”, “Samson and Delilah” and a few other very resistible films. Became a star by the grace of Louis B. Mayer, the all-powerful boss of MGM, she then ravaged hearts, collected the most improbable lovers, shot in mass-produced films, inspired the character of Snow White , provoked the Trojan War in an Italian peplum, played Joan of Arc in a nanar modestly titled “The History of Humanity”, invented a communication system for torpedoes and a process for concentrating Coke into soluble tablets. 1980s: recluse, forgotten, ravaged by plastic surgery, Hedy Lamarr imagines a new red light, applies herself to modifying the fuselage of the Concorde, draws a ramp for the bathtubs of the disabled, tinkers with a luminous collar for dogs.
Its communication system is used today in the GPS, in the satellites, in the wifi. The newspaper “Forbes” calculates the rights that she could have received – if the patent had remained attributed to her. The sum is astronomical: 30 billion dollars. Hedy Lamarr died on January 19, 2000, at the age of 85, in poverty. She survived on a $300 pension, paid by the Screen Actors Guild. His ashes were scattered in Vienna, on a hill called Am Himmel (“In paradise”).
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“Hedy Lamarr, star and genius inventor”
Sunday January 22 at 11:05 p.m. on Arte. Documentary by Alexandra Dean (2017). 1h24 (Available in replay until February 20, 2023 on Arte.tv).
