Philip French's screen legends: Hedy Lamarr

No. 71: Hedy Lamarr 1913-2000

She was born Hedwig Ava Maria Kiesler into the cultivated Jewish upper-middle class of Vienna, her father a banker, her mother a pianist. Max Reinhardt, the greatest figure in German theatre, under whom she studied, is quoted calling her "the most beautiful woman in Europe", a claim later elevated by MGM's publicists to "the world's most beautiful woman".

Her first few films are forgotten but in 1933 the Czech director Gustav Machaty's Ecstasy gave her instant notoriety and a form of immortality as a teenage bride who deserts her rich, impotent husband and finds sexual fulfilment in the arms of a young engineer. An affecting movie, it retains its lyrical eroticism and has been more censored, butchered and mocked than almost any other. With little more than a dozen lines of dialogue, it was virtually the last great German movie of the silent era. Her first husband, an Austrian munitions tycoon some years her senior with Nazi connections, tried to destroy every copy, and like the heroine of Ecstasy she fled . In London she met MGM boss Louis B Mayer, who signed her up as another Garbo. Because Mayer thought her name was too like "keester" (US slang for backside), he renamed her Lamarr after silent star Barbara LaMarr who died of an overdose in 1926.

She was moderately tall, had perfect features with crescent eyebrows, sparkling eyes, raven-black hair parted in the middle, a slightly tilted nose and flaring nostrils. For a decade she was cast opposite MGM's male stars – Spencer Tracy (whose lover she was before he met Hepburn), Clark Gable, William Powell – in solid genre movies, usually as a femme fatale. But for her first and best Hollywood movie, Algiers (1938), MGM loaned her to Walter Wanger for this excellent Hollywood remake of the French success Pépé le Moko. She played the cool woman who lures gangster Charles Boyer into the hands of the law. She gained a reputation as difficult to work with or remain married to (she had six husbands). As contract star at MGM and as producer of her own films she showed poor judgment, turning down the roles in Casablanca and Gaslight that made Ingrid Bergman famous. And she became dangerously litigious. Her most popular commercial success came as the ultimate temptress destroying Victor Mature in DeMille's 1949 blockbuster Samson and Delilah. Surprisingly she had only two decent roles thereafter, as a conniving business queen in the western Copper Canyon (1950), and abetting Bob Hope in the spoof My Favourite Spy (1951).

The rest was scandal and trivia: two arrests (without convictions) for shoplifting; a bankruptcy; a false charge of rape; a fraudulent insurance claim; the publication of a squalid ghosted memoir, Ecstasy and Me (1965) that led to her suing her ghost author for misrepresentation.

Perhaps this all stemmed from her professional discontent and intellectual frustration. Because in 1940, drawing on knowledge of military technology absorbed during her first marriage, she joined with avant-garde composer George Antheil in creating a torpedo-defence system that led to a patent and recognition from the National Invention Council. It was ahead of the times but she's now acknowledged as a pioneer in the field of spread-spectrum communications.

Her legendary status was further enhanced by Dory Previn's poignant 1971 song, "Mary C. Brown and the Hollywood Sign", about a Tinseltown suicide:

"She jumped off the letter 'H'

'Cause she didn't become a star.

She died in less than a minute and a half

She looked a bit like Hedy Lamarr."

Groucho Marx on Samson and Delilah "I'm not interested in a film where the man's tits are bigger than the woman's."

George Sanders, co-star in Samson and Delilah "When she spoke, one did not listen, one just watched her mouth moving and marvelled at the exquisite shapes made by her lips."

Her war effort In 1942 she raised a record $7m at a single war bonds event.

Essential DVDs Ecstasy, Algiers, Ziegfeld Girl, Heavenly Body, Samson and Delilah, My Favourite Spy.

Contributor

Philip French

The GuardianTramp

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