Once dubbed the world’s most beautiful woman, Hollywood siren and legendary inventor Hedy Lamarr spent her last years in a humble home in Florida.
Despite her significant contributions as an inventor in the 20th century, she spent her final days secluded from the public eye, residing in a modest three-bedroom house in Casselberry, located just 20 minutes outside Orlando.
Regarded as a recluse in her later years, Lamarr passed away at 85 in January 2000, tragically without receiving proper recognition for her groundbreaking invention that played a pivotal role in transforming society.
‘Mom visited friends in Florida & just ended up staying there,’ Lamarr’s daughter Denise Loder-DeLuca told Click Orlando
Her life concluded unexpectedly, deviating from societal norms as she defied traditional gender roles by actively participating in the advancement of technology, notably contributing to the development of telephone and wireless internet technologies to aid the allied forces during World War II.
Lamarr, born in Austria, captured Hollywood’s attention after she fled her Nazi-sympathizing husband in the early 1930s.
The beauty, who was married six times, emigrated to the United States after a stop in London and went on to star in films with the likes of Spencer Tracy, James Stewart and Clark Gable in what proved to be a glittering career.
But after becoming disillusioned with acting and the roles she was offered, she helped to devise the technology she became most famous for in response to the Nazis’ repeated jamming of radio signals being used to guide torpedoes to their targets in WWII.
Along with composer and fellow inventor George Antheil, she created a device that allowed ‘frequency hopping’, which made the radio transmissions harder to intercept and allowed the missiles to reach their target.
The pair based the system on a piano’s 88 keys and submitted a patent for the idea in 1941.
A patent was then granted the following year, but the US Navy opted against using the technology in the war.
Instead, Lamarr supported the war effort by using her celebrity to help sell war bonds in her adopted country.
Her technology was later used on US warships during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 – although Lamarr did not receive a penny.
It was decades after Lamarr had arrived in the US for a peace of the American Dream.
Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler to a banker and a pianist in Vienna, Austria in 1914.
She got her start as an actress in her teenage years, debuting in the Czech film Ecstasy at the age of 18 in 1933.
The film was controversial because it portrayed the first female orgasm ever seen in a non-pornographic film.
It was in 1934 in her native Vienna that she married her first husband, arms manufacturer Fritz Mandl but quickly became disillusioned with the union and fled their home in the middle of the night.
She later claimed in her autobiography that Mandl had struck up close business ties with the Nazis and alleged that Adolf Hitler and Italy’s fascist ruler Benito Mussolini attended parties at his home.
After going to London, it was MGM studio chief Louis B.Mayer who she convinced to hand her a lucrative contract – even though she could only speak a small amount of English at this point.
Lamarr then moved to the US and mixed with the likes of future US President John F Kennedy and the aviation millionaire Howard Hughes – who she dated – in Beverley Hills.
He gave her the equipment she needed to run experiments in her trailer and took her to his aeroplane factory, where he showed her how his machines were built.
After seeing his planes, Lamarr sketched a new wing design for them, prompting Hughes to brand her a ‘genius’.
Lamarr is credited in a total of 35 films, but the actress was reportedly bored of the roles she was given that were often light on lines and focused on her looks.
‘Any girl can be glamorous,’ she once famously said. ‘All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.’
Lamarr, who had three children, divorced from her sixth husband in 1965 after just two years with him.
The star died in the year 2000 in Florida after suffering from heart failure.
The 2017 documentary film Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr story re-told the story of the film star’s incredible life.
