Lisa Armstrong
The fabulous, frustrating life of Hedy Lamarr
At the height of her career, Hedy Lamarr, a Jewish émigré from Nazi Austria, co-starred in movies opposite Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart and Bob Hope. Even when her career was on the slide, in the late Forties, she scored the co-lead in Cecil B de Mille’s Samson and Delilah – the decade’s second biggest grossing film after Gone With the Wind. But that’s by the by.
She also had six husbands. And she was properly dropdead gorgeous, a sultrier Vivien Leigh, with no small sense of style (seductive, glamorous but always classy and, as can be seen here, timeless).
But never mind all that – she didn’t, railing for years that her looks prevented most people from taking her seriously. The bigger story here is that Hedy was a genius: an inventor, endlessly scribbling ideas between takes, then fleshing them out in detail. The greatest of her many ingenuities was a technology known as radio