Inventors: Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr was a glamorous Austrian film star who was often typecast as a provocative femme fatale. Years after her screen career ended, she achieved recognition as a noted inventor of a radio communications device.

Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr fled an oppressive marriage to create a name for herself as one of Hollywood's top leading ladies in the 1940s. Behind the glamour and sex appeal, though, was a talented and inquisitive inventor who created a radio system that is now considered the basis of Bluetooth technology.

Hedy Lamarr was a woman who seemed to have it all—glamour, power, wealth, intelligence, and adoration. But behind the public success, there was private heartache and personal tragedy. This episode of Extraordinary Women features archival video footage, interviews and dramatic re-enactment of the life of Hedy Lamarr, one of many pioneering women who paid a price for her achievements. Learn how Lamarr emerged as a triumphant inspirational icon of science and entertainment in the 20th century. A BBC Production.

Hedy Lamarr made her living as eye candy. But she had a secret. Lamarr, you see, was smart. In fact, today's wireless and cell phone networks use technology she patented in 1942 together with composer George Antheil. The invention--frequency hopping spread-spectrum communication--was meant to make radio signals that guided torpedoes hard for enemies to detect. Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna on November 9, 1914, to Jewish parents. She studied ballet and piano and in her teens won European film roles including 1933's Extase (Ecstasy), in which she appeared nude. At 19 she married the first of six husbands, Vienna arms manufacturer Friedrich Mandl. He entertained Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler at grand parties, infuriating his wife. Lamarr left the controlling Mandl.

Hedy Lamarr, a brain as well as a body, died on January 19th, aged 86

WHEN Hedy Lamarr arrived in Hollywood she was seen as a rare and desirable acquisition: a genuine decadent, a temptress to send male pulses racing, and create envy in women's hearts. Home-grown temptresses had been tried with only varying success. An American houri is a contradiction. In the 1920s Theda Bara (an anagram of Arab Death) had done her vampish best to sully the minds of clean-living Americans, and had been much attacked from the pulpits of the mid-west, but her seductive powers had diminished when it emerged that her real name was Goodman and she had been born in Cincinnati. Miss Lamarr, though, was from deepest Europe, from Vienna.