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Hedy Lamarr ( /ˈhɛdi/; November 9, 1913 – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-American actress celebrated for her great beauty who was a major contract star of MGM's "Golden Age". Lamarr also co-invented – with composer George Antheil – an early technique for spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping, necessary to wireless communication from the pre-computer age to the present day. Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of assimilated Jewish parents (but raised Catholic), Gertrud (née Lichtwitz), a pianist and Budapest... MORE

Hedy Lamarr ( /ˈhɛdi/; November 9, 1913 – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-American actress celebrated for her great beauty who was a major contract star of MGM's "Golden Age". Lamarr also co-invented – with composer George Antheil – an early technique for spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping, necessary to wireless communication from the pre-computer age to the present day. Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of assimilated Jewish parents (but raised Catholic), Gertrud (née Lichtwitz), a pianist and Budapest native who came from the "Jewish haute bourgeoisie", and Lemberg-born Emil Kiesler, a successful bank director. Her father died in Vienna before the Holocaust, and Lamarr rescued her mother. She studied ballet and piano at age 10. When she worked with Max Reinhardt in Berlin, he called her the "most beautiful woman in Europe". Soon the teenage girl was playing major roles in German movies alongside stars like Heinz Rühmann and Hans Moser. In early 1933 she starred in Gustav Machatý's notorious film Ecstasy, a Czechoslovak film made in Prague, in which she played the love-hungry young wife of an indifferent older LESS