10 THINGS ABOUT HEDY LAMARR

 

• Sued Mel Brooks for mocking her name in his film Blazing Saddles (1974) (they settled out of court) and  software company Corel Corporation for using her photo on the cover of software product CorelDRAW. [April 1998]
• After a screen test, it was Louis B. Mayer who changed her last name to Lamarr in honour of silent film star Barbara La Marr.
• One of the few stars with whom costume designer Edith Head admitted she didn't like working. The others were Claudette Colbert and Paulette Goddard.
• Hedy's credited invention was for a radio guiding system for torpedoes which was used in WWII. She supposedly gained the knowledge from her first husband, Fritz Mandl, a Viennese munitions dealer who sided with the Nazis. Hedy drugged her maid to escape her husband and homeland. Was also co-inventor (with composer George Antheil) of the earliest known form of the telecommunications method known as "frequency hopping", which used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or to jam. The method received U.S. patent number 2,292,387 on Aug. 11, 1942, under the name "Secret Communications System". Frequency hopping is now widely used in cellular phones and other modern technology. However neither she nor Antheil profited from this fact, because their patents were allowed to expire decades before the modern wireless boom. She received an award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997 for her pioneering work in spread-spectrum technology. The first Inventor's Day in Germany was held in her honour on 9 November 2005, what would have been her 92nd birthday.
• For her appearance in Ekstase (1933), Hedy is credited as being the first nude woman as well as portraying the first sex-scene in film history. Scenes were cut and additional ones added in order to be able to release it in some countries. However, she was actually at least 18 years too late to be the first nude woman in film, as both Inspiration (1915) and Lois Weber's Hypocrites (1915) had beaten her to it.

• Her profile was the most requested in the 1940s by women to their plastic surgeons.
• The mansion used in The Sound of Music (1965) belonged to her at the time.
• Was considered for the role of Ilsa Lund in Casablanca (1942), but Ingrid Bergman was cast instead. When Julius Epstein, one of the several screenwriters for Casablanca, was trying to "pitch" (explain the plot) to David Selznick (the producer from whom they wanted to borrow Ingrid Bergman) Epstein started a long, drawn-out summary but finally wrapped up with "Oh, what the hell! It's going to be a lot of shit like Algiers!" Algiers had starred Hedy Lamarr.
• Was cast in the picture Picture Mommy Dead (1966), but fired on February 3, 1966, when she didn't show up for the first day of shooting.
• Was the inspiration for Anne Hathaway's performance of Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises (2012).