Lamarr’s story has been told in the 2012 book “Hedy’s Folly” by Richard Rhodes and in Alexandra Dean’s 2017 documentary “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story.” She did note that the Navy had used her invention for a sonar buoy system, so she couldn’t file a claim. Heather Massie plays actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr in “Hedy! The Life and Inventions of Hedy Lamarr” at the Sarasota Jewish Theatre.Ī patent was recorded in 1942 but it took until 1997 before Lamarr received any recognition for her creation. Actress overcomes stereotypesĪt the time, no one in Hollywood society would expect that someone who looked and acted like Lamarr could also have a scientific mind. She worked with composer George Antheil on the projects. But she was also an inventor who created a radio guidance system for torpedoes during World War II and a system to stop frequency jamming by allied enemies. “Her story is very dramatic and interesting and larger than life.” Lamarr became famous in such films as “Samson and Delilah,” “White Cargo,” “Lady of the Tropics” and working opposite Bob Hope, Jimmy Stewart and Spencer Tracy. Somehow, recreating the look of the actress as seen in one of her photos “made me think I could play the most beautiful woman in the world,” Massie said with a laugh during a recent Zoom interview.īut it wasn’t Lamarr’s looks that interested Massie. A sudden star, she married the plutocrat Fritz Mandl, an arms manufacturer and Nazi lickspittle who spent much of his marriage buying copies of Ekstase and destroying them.Heather Massie stars in a one-woman play about film star Hedy Lamarr, who invented technology for guiding torpedoes that later became essential for the development of cell phones. While still in her teens, she starred in the notorious 1933 film Ekstase, which reportedly included the first onscreen depiction of a female orgasm.

Rather than pursue a technical career, though, she became an actress. As a girl, she accompanied her father, a banker, on long walks, absorbing his detailed explanations of how printing presses, streetcars, and other modern marvels worked. Lamarr-born Hedwig Kiesler-came from an unremarkable, even boring bourgeois family in Vienna. Rhodes succeeds in the most vital thing-capturing the spirit of a willful woman who wanted recognition for more than her pretty face-but he skims over the deeper questions that Lamarr’s life story raises about the nature of creative genius. Compared to his other works, like the magisterial (and quite hefty) The Making of the Atomic Bomb, this book breezes by in 272 chatty pages. This unlikely tale is the subject of Richard Rhodes’ new book, Hedy’s Folly.

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes