PBS’ ‘American Masters’ profiles Hedy Lamarr, movie star and inventor
Most know Hedy Lamarr as the glamorous 1930s and ’40s movie actress famous for such classics as “Samson and Delilah,” “White Cargo” and “Lady of the Tropics.” Less known is the brainy Austrian beauty’s other life as an inventor with a patent that would form the basis for the communication systems we use today.
Her story is told in the “American Masters” documentary “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story,” premiering Friday, May 18, on PBS (check local listings). Using never-before-heard audio tapes of an interview she granted Forbes magazine in 1990 and comments from son Anthony Loder, filmmaker Mel Brooks and late movie aficionado Robert Osborne, director Alexandra Dean’s 90-minute film paints a picture of a misunderstood young woman who became frustrated with being pigeon-holed as a know-nothing actress but had an avid interest in science and the mind of an inventor.
Most prominent among her ideas was the concept of frequency hopping, which she developed to thwart German efforts to jam Allied radio signals during World War II. It’s a technology used today in everything from cellphones and Bluetooth to wi-fi and GPS. She had it patented in 1942 but never saw a dime from it up to the day she died in 2000.
“In terms of making her mark on her world ... I think, by Hedy’s own assessment, it wasn’t through the acting that she did that,” explains Dean to a recent gathering of journalists in Pasadena. Calif. “So we really portrayed the acting insofar as it did allow her to make that mark. And also the acting, by the way, was also a way of kind of keeping her in a box, and we explore that, I think, at great length. So this film is not a hagiography about her acting career, absolutely not. It is about her acting insofar as her mission was to make her mark, and she did try to do it that way.”