She fell for his charming and fascinating personality, partly due to his immense financial wealth. Mandl was an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. He became obsessed with getting to know her. She sent most of them away, including a man who was more insistent, Friedrich Mandl. Admirers sent roses to her dressing room and tried to get backstage to meet her. Lamarr played a number of stage roles, including a starring one in Sissy, a play about Empress Elisabeth of Austria produced in Vienna. Lamarr then starred in the film which made her internationally famous. Granowsky soon moved to Paris, but Lamarr stayed in Berlin and was given the lead role in No Money Needed (1932), a comedy directed by Carl Boese. (1931), starring Walter Abel and Peter Lorre. Instead, she met the Russian theatre producer Alexis Granowsky, who cast her in his film directorial debut, The Trunks of Mr. However, she never actually trained with Reinhardt or appeared in any of his Berlin productions. Reinhardt was so impressed with her that he brought her with him back to Berlin. Producer Max Reinhardt then cast her in a play entitled The Weaker Sex, which was performed at the Theater in der Josefstadt. While there, she was able to get a role as an extra in Money on the Street (1930), and then a small speaking part in Storm in a Water Glass (1931). Lamarr was taking acting classes in Vienna when one day, she forged a note from her mother and went to Sascha-Film and was able to get herself hired as a script girl. She also began to associate invention with her father, who would take her out on walks, explaining how technology functioned. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. : 8Īs a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film. She had converted to Catholicism and was described as a "practicing Christian" who raised her daughter as a Christian, although Hedy was not formally baptized at the time. Trude, her mother, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Hungarian-Jewish family. Her father, Emil, was born to a Galician-Jewish family in Lemberg in the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was, in the 1920s, deputy director of Wiener Bankverein, and in the end of his life a director at the united Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, the only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (née Lichtwitz) and Emil Kiesler. She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.Īt the beginning of World War II, she and avant-garde composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. She also acted on television before the release of her final film, The Female Animal (1958). DeMille's Bible-inspired Samson and Delilah (1949). Her greatest success was as Delilah in Cecil B. Her MGM films include Lady of the Tropics (1939), Boom Town (1940), H.M. She became a film star with her performance in Algiers (1938). Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. Traveling to London, she met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Īfter a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her first husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. She was a film star during Hollywood's golden age. Hedy Lamarr ( / ˈ h ɛ d i/ born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler Novem – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born Austro-Hungarian-American film actress and inventor.
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