Re-discovering Hedy Lamarr

I’ve been on a bit of a Hedy Lamarr kick recently. While Lamar (born Hedwig Kiesler) was still vaguely a part of the pop culture landscape when I was growing up, I don’t recall her films popping up much on television when I was a kid or the revival theater circuit when I was in college. As a result, this made her an abstract presence—a remote figure famous for being famous. So aside from her name, I was pretty oblivious to her work as an actress or personal biography. In fact, she probably was more familiar to me as the brand image of a computer program I used for many years called CorelDraw—her likeness was used on the application's package for many years. (A screen shot of the box cover is included in the images at the end of this post—in 1998, a few years before her passing in 2000, she settled a lawsuit with the company over this unlicensed use of her image.)

In 2017, however, she popped onto my radar—and everyone else’s—due to a documentary produced by Susan Sarandon about the actress called Bombshell: Hedy Lamarr (eventually featured in an episode of the PBS series, American Masters). The film covers her fascinating life: born to a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family (the father was from Ukraine) that had converted to Catholicism, she appeared nude as a teen actress in a groundbreaking Czech film called Ecstacy where she also was featured in a scene what is considered the first portrayal on screen of an orgasm (which primarily consisted of close ups of her face in the throes of passion); she then married a Jewish munitions manufacturer, one of the richest men in Austria, who counted Nazi Germany and fascist Italy as clients; then left her husband and an unhappy marriage to flee Europe and eventually booked passage to the U.S. where she was signed on route by Louis B. Mayer at MGM before even landing ashore.

More notably, as was more publicly known only late in her life, Lamarr was also a gifted intellect and inventor who, with music film composer George Antheil, patented the technology that in later years served as the foundation for modern day wifi and GPS. Though this technology was not used until well after the patent had formally expired, before she passed, Lamarr was officially recognized and honored for her groundbreaking scientific work and, after her death, posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

As her personal life reveals, she was a woman who followed her own path, passions and impulses, yet tragically felt trapped (and cursed) by her beauty. For these reasons, despite her brilliant intellect, having been defined and admired her entire life because of her looks, she sadly spent her final years in seclusion, unable to age gracefully in the public eye.

More recently, after enjoying the coffee table book, Glamour and Style: The Beauty of Hedy Lamarr, by Stephen Michael Shearer, about the actress’s life and career (the writer also earlier wrote a full-length biography), I decided to track down and watch whatever of her films I could find. These included: Algiers (1938) with Charles Boyer; Comrade X with Clark Gable (1940); Come Live with Me (1941) with Jimmy Stewart; Tortilla Flat (1942) with John Garfield and Spencer Tracy; H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941) with Robert Young; The Strange Woman (1946) with George Sanders; and Dishonored Lady (1947).

While I can’t quite say that Lamarr’s dazzling looks successfully made up for any acting deficiencies, she nevertheless possessed a glowing screen presence when it was allowed to shine through—in the films I watched, I found her more delightful in lighter fare when she got to be more playful, vulnerable and human—such as Comrade X, Come Live With Me, H.M. Pulham, Esq. and Dishonored Lady. On the whole, however, the studios didn’t seem to know what to do with her and the quality of her films reflect that. Her European allure (and accent) limited her to “exotic” roles, such as a Portuguese immigrant in Tortilla Flat and native girls in White Cargo and Lady of the Tropics, where she sometimes sported dark skin coloring while speaking with her native light Austrian accent. She also had the misfortune to be an also-ran among the European actresses in Hollywood: Comrade X was a knockoff meant to capitalize on Greta Garbo’s Ninotchka, while Algiers was a precursor to Casablanca (in fact, the filmmakers reportedly initially wanted Lamarr for the role that Ingrid Bergman ultimately filled).

As a result, most of Lamarr’s films consist of B-movie and kitschy melodramas that haven’t aged well (this includes the film she produced as a star vehicle for herself, the Strange Woman, considered one of her best performances). And with apologies to actors like Charles Boyer, George Sanders, Spencer Tracy and Dennis O’Keefe (anyone?), it didn’t help that (in my view at least) she wasn’t paired with leading men with the same level of sizzle or provided much onscreen chemistry. Of the films I saw, my favorites were Comrade X with Gable, a conscious knock off of Ninotchka as I mentioned above; Come Live With Me, a somewhat caustic romantic comedy with Jimmy Stewart; and Dishonorable Woman, another melodrama that’s a mashup between a psychological drama (or, more accurately, psychological babble) and a wrongly-accused-of-murder thriller. That all said, I do hope to catch more of her films, particularly Samson and Delilah, her biggest hit, though her career declined after that temporary peak.

Anyway, given the forgettable and outdated nature of her films and roles, I can understand to some degree why Lamarr is not as well remembered as many of her Hollywood contemporaries. Nevertheless, given that she was for a time considered “the most beautiful woman in the world”—an image no doubt ultimately impossible to live up to—and the fact that she also turned out to have an incredibly brilliant mind, I’m glad that the life and legacy of Lamarr has been rediscovered and remembered.