HEDY READY FOR HER CLOSEUP
She was H'wood's belle with intel
Hollywood siren Hedy Lamarr starred in 1940s flicks opposite the likes of Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy — but in her down time, the brunette beauty helped invent technology that paved the way for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, according to a new documentary.
The flick “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story’’ — produced by actress Susan Sarandon — touches on the 35 movies that the sizzling star made, including one she filmed at age 17 in which she portrayed the first female orgasm ever shown in a non-pornographic film.
But the documentary, which premieres Wednesday in London as part of the Jewish Film Festival, focuses more on Lamarr’s role in developing a radiofrequency system meant to scramble weapons communications so the country’s enemies couldn’t interfere with its radio-controlled missiles.
“Any girl can be glamorous,” Lamarr once famously said of her screen career. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”
Lamarr was a Jew who es- caped pre-war Austria and her abusive husband, a munitions magnate who worked with the Nazis.
While building her Hollywood career as World War II raged, she began devoting her spare time to creating a better communications system for the US Navy.
Lamarr’s part in the development of what she called “frequency hopping,” a way to avoid the German jamming of radio signals, had mostly been an obscure part of Hollywood legend — until now.
She realized that a constantly changing frequency was harder to jam.
The documentary tells Lamarr’s story partly through previously unheard tapes of an interview she gave to Forbes magazine in 1990, 10 years before she died in Florida at the age of 86.
Lamarr explains her interest in technology, saying, “Inventions are easy for me to do. I suppose I just came from a different planet.”
Lamarr had a room in her mansion dedicated to inventing, and she, along with composer George Antheil, created a device that allowed the “frequency hopping.” The duo came up with a scrambling system based on the 88 keys in a piano. On Aug. 11, 1942, they received a patent for it.
But the idea wasn’t implemented until the US Navy began using it in the 1960s. The idea served for a torpedo guidance system.
Technology based on their idea is now used today in wireless phones, GPS and by the military.
In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
While retired in Florida, Lamarr continued to work on inventions, including a pocket on the side of a Kleenex box for used tissues.