Hedy Lamarr

 Hedy Lamarr (November 9,1914 – January 19, 2000)

After an early and brief film career in Germany, which included a controversial love-making scene in the film Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her husband and secretly moved to Paris. There, she met MGM head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood, where she became a film star from the late 1930s to the 1950s. Lamarr appeared in numerous popular feature films, including Algiers (1938) with Charles Boyer, I Take This Woman (1940) with Spencer Tracy, Comrade X (1940) with Clark Gable, Come Live With Me (1941) with James Stewart, H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941) with Robert Young, and Samson and Delilah (1949) with Victor Mature. Director Max Reinhardt called her the "most beautiful woman in Europe," a sentiment widely shared by her audiences and critics. At the beginning of World War II, with composer George Antheil, Lamarr developed radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes, using spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Though the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are now incorporated into modern Wi-Fi, CDMA and Bluetooth technology, and this work led to them being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. The 1970s was a decade of increasing seclusion for Lamarr. She was offered several scripts, television commercials, and stage projects, but none piqued her interest.

In 1974, she filed an invasion of privacy lawsuit for US$10 million for an unauthorized use of her name (i.e. "Hedley Lamarr" in Mel Brooks' comedy film Blazing Saddles); the case was settled out of court. With failing eyesight, she retreated from public life and settled in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1981. Hedy Lamarr died in Casselberry, Florida, on January 19, 2000, aged 85. Her death certificate cited three causes: heart failure, chronic valvular heart disease, and arteriosclerotic heart disease.