About doing more with your life than being stationary and looking dumb. “Any girl can be glamorous,” Lamarr said. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” … Did she stand up and stand in for Hitler. According to Devra Hill, the incriminating evidence was a gold cigarette case with an engraved diamond swastika. Hard to explain how the unpredictable almost unfathomable angel of coincidence could have created such a scenario. She was apparently pimped into the weekend tryst by an abusive first husband to told her to cater to his kinkiness since a big arms deal hinged on his satisfaction. A private Joy Division.
Lamarr. The Strange Woman. 1946. Read More:http://www.doctormacro.com/movie%20star%20pages/Lamarr,%20Hedy-Annex.htm
It goes some way in explaining her life, this potential Judith doing in Holofernes to screen beauty. Her life is also the story about how intrinsic or inherent qualities are attributed to women such as Lamarr which has nothing to do with her actual character. Because these attributions are connected to assigned roles their legitimation is dubious and ambivalent in order to avoid touching the status quo and menacing the social institution of Hollywood in which men enjoy the lion’s share stake and in which women can be deceived into believing they benefit…
from the Globe and Mail: …she had been dubbed “the most beautiful woman in the world.” In 1945, Time Magazine proclaimed Hedy Lamarr as the American soldier’s favourite pin-up. There was an especially sexy aura attached to Lamarr, dating from the mid-1930s, when at 17 she stared, with brief nudity, in a scandalous Czech film called Ecstasy. …Among her inventions, in collaboration with the musical composer George Antheil, was a radio guidance system for jam-proof torpedoes that incorporated an idea called “frequency hopping,” which in its more modern manifestation, as spread-spectrum technology, is the basis for everything from cell phones to GPS. …
---“Hedy didn’t drink. She didn’t like to party… Her idea of a good evening was a quiet dinner party with some intelligent friends where they could discuss ideas - which sounds so UN-Hollywood, but Hedy had to find something else to do to occupy her time," said Rhodes.--- Read More:http://www.christianpost.com/news/biography-reveals-starlet-hedy-lamarr-helped-invent-wireless-technology-63266/ image:http://photos.lucywho.com/hedy-lamarr-photo-gallery-c15801097.html
…Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, in Vienna, in 1913, the only child of a well-to-do family of assimilated Jews. From an early age, she dreamed of becoming a movie star, but she also had an insatiable curiosity. Her handsome, vigorous father read her books and took her on long walks, during which he would explain how everything worked, “from printing presses to streetcars,” she later explained.
At 19, stunningly beautiful and infamous for her role in Ecstasy, she married Friedrich Mandl, a wealthy, Vienna-based arms manufacturer who was apparently willing to sell weapons to whoever would buy. It was a fraught, doomed marriage – a rebellious, independent woman and a dominating, possessive man (Mandl tried to buy up every extant copy of the infamous film). But in Mandl’s company she learned about armaments inside and out. “He [Mandl] had the most amazing brain,” Hedy later wrote. “There was nothing he did not know.”
---Lamarr, with her daily bathing rituals and rare steaks and languorous sleeping patterns. The same Lamarr who declared “I must quit marrying men who feel inferior to me!” And who also declared: I know why most people never get rich. They put the money ahead of the job. If you just think of the job, the money will automatically follow. This never fails.--- Read More:http://unicornsforsocialism.com/2010/06/23/life-design-by-hedy-lamarr/
But Hedwig Kiesler Mandl was not content to be a trophy wife. In 1937, she gathered her jewels and furs and, disguised as her maid, escaped to Paris, and eventually to Hollywood, where she was transformed by MGM into Hedy Lamarr and splashed all over the silver screen. Her inventive talents also now came to the fore. By day, she dazzled in Busby Berkeley’s Ziegfeld Girl; by night, she worked on frequency-hopping….
…how Lamarr’s knowledge of armaments and Antheil’s experience with synchronizing player pianos and other mechanic musical instruments led them to a patent for a way to make radio-guided torpedoes jam-proof. Hedy wanted to do her patriotic best for her adopted country and enlisted Antheil in her cause. Their technique of synchronized “frequency-hopping” came too late to affect the outcome of the war, but eventually became incorporated into a wide variety of electronic communication devices. Read More:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/hedys-folly-by-richard-rhodes/article2265912/a
---Nazi leader Adolf Hitler overlooked the fact his one-time lover Hedy Lamarr was born Jewish, because her beauty made it difficult for him to pass up a sex tryst with her. The famous silver screen actress, born Hedwig Kiesler, fled Austria to embark on an acting career in Hollywood after she was forced to make love to Hitler by her first husband, Austrian munitions dealer Fritz Mandl. Lamarr took the shame of the three-way sex tryst to the grave with her, according to biographer Devra Hill. And she died in 2000 still disbelieving she had briefly romanced the man behind the Holocaust. “Hitler knew she was Jewish - her real name was Hedwig Kiesler, which was an obvious Jewish name, Contactmusic quoted Hill, as saying. I think he overlooked this because he wanted to get all those munitions from her husband. He also wanted to be with Hedy - she was beautiful, Hill added. Hill insists the tryst only took place once after one of Mandl’’s lavish parties in the mid-1930s--- Read More:http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/health/hitler-couldnt-resist-sex-trysts-with-hedy-lamarr-despite-her-jewish-roots_10087407.html
ge:http://blazingcatfur.blogspot.com/2011/05/because-its-friday-and-its-hedy-lamarr.htmlADDENDUM:
It’s not surprising that she’s known best for her sultry persona, given her film role that made everyone sit up and take notice. In 1933’s “Ecstasy,” a Czech film, she raised eyebrows and drew condemnation around the globe when she appeared nude in one part of the film and simulated an orgasm in another.
Lamarr is seen going skinny-dipping and, still without a stitch on, chasing a runaway horse. The orgasm scene comes later, and, yes, she does smoke a cigarette afterward. “Ecstasy” is considered the first theatrically released movie to feature an actress simulating an orgasm on screen. Read More:http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gossip/2011/11/hedy-lamarr-inventor-hedy-lamarr-sex-symbol.html
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Judith with the head of holofernes. Rubens. Read More:http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/peter-paul-rubens/judith-with-the-head-of-holofernes
Lamarr’s films were a hodgepodge of hit or miss (mostly the latter), her roles a chaotic series of European exotics, chilly patricians and dark-skinned seductresses, who invariably turned out to be of impeccable Aryan parentage (most ludicrously, as the “Negress” Tondelayo in “White Cargo”). If there was a pattern, it was in movies like “I Take This Woman” and “Boom Town,” where, as Shearer points out, she was cast “as an exotic reward for a virtuous, white American male.” If Mayer didn’t know what to do with her, neither did anybody else, least of all herself.
…Too often, she looked, and was treated, like a piece of sculpture. In “Algiers,” neither Charles Boyer’s devastatingly appealing Pepe le Moko, nor the genius cinematography of James Wong Howe, not even her own knockout black-and-white wardrobe, set like a jewel in Howe’s light-and-shadows Casbah, can make her more than a beautiful adjunct, a mannequin who looks neither at Boyer nor the camera. It’s as if Hedwig Kiesler, insecure about her acting and straining not to do too much, ends up a blank….
If her life was a series of wild escapades — six husbands, multiple lovers (some of them women, according to her memoir), children of vague parentage, constant litigation and the tawdry tabloid scandals — none of this drama made it into the movies, partly because of an accident of bad timing. She arrived in Hollywood when the Hays Office was at the zenith of its censorial powers. Studios would buy sizzling properties, then, kowtowing to the Production Code, eliminate the sizzle for the family audience, until the whole point — often a woman’s shadowy background, illicit desires — had been lost. Lamarr was herself one such hot property, but she was at the most puritanical studio, where any real sensuality had to be covered up or displaced onto foreigners or bad girls….
…She turned down the role of the wife in “Gaslight” because she wouldn’t take second billing to Boyer, while Bergman, Shearer says, “didn’t give a damn about billing” (she took the part and won the best-actress Oscar for it). When, according to Lamarr’s own account, her friend Otto Preminger showed her the script of “Laura,” she turned it down because she “didn’t think it was very good.” She also rejected “The Paradine Case,” and with those three refusals forfeited the chance to work with George Cukor, Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock. She was a creature of black-and-white cinematography, but longed to appear in color, and her favorite movie — and the one most people today remember — was the 1949 De Mille camp epic “Samson and Delilah.”
…She seemed divided about herself and her image right from the beginning. She claimed she never knew she was to do nude scenes in “Ecstasy,” though people on the set said otherwise. On the breast issue, she researched the possibility of glandular augmentation, but later insisted she would never do anything about them. (Hers were perfectly fine except by the increasingly grandiose mammary standards of Hollywood.) She never mentioned her Jewish background, but assisted in the war effort and in later life congregated with fellow European exiles. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about changing your name or your breasts or your hairline or your voice or your accent, or with suppressing your ethnicity and background, but with Lamarr the process involved whittling away parts of an identity without quite finding a new one to inhabit. “That’s what Hollywood does,” she wrote plaintively in her memoir. “You don’t know who you are after a while.”…
Occasionally she got to play the smart go-getter, most notably in “H. M. Pulham Esq.,” and this incarnation of a new kind of American career woman is taken by both Shearer and Barton to be the closest thing we have to the real Lamarr (though “real,” applied to this dauntingly elusive creature, is an approximate term at best). Like the biographers, most reviewers agreed that this was the movie in which she gave her best performance. In a world turned upside down by World War I, the androgynously named Marvin Myles doesn’t just smoke and drink, she bullies (and sleeps with) her neophyte boyfriend, played by Robert Young, and certainly has more authority at work than the women in the ’50s-and-’60s world of “Mad Men.”… Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/books/review/Haskell-t.html?pagewanted=all
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from The Strange Woman directed by Edgar Ulmer:It is surprising to see that a 1946 vehicle for such a glamorous star such as Hedy Lamarr to find such dark sexual overtones, including sadomasochism, so openly discussed. Not five minutes after Lamarr’s entrance do we see her smile when her father whips her (and even suggested is an incestual streak the two share, as he says to her “I’m going to give you a beating you WON’T enjoy”), followed by enticing Isaiah with her scars (though unlike Yvonne DeCarlo in Criss Cross and Gloria Grahame in Human Desire, she uses her beatings not to portray herself victim, but to only add promise of a kinky relationship). Add another 5 minutes to this scene and she’s writing an incredibly predatory, sexually teasing letter to her ‘son’ Ephraim. If noir looks at the darkness of the human soul, this is one of the darkest journeys into human sexuality (and supposedly the novel is far racier than this picture, taking the elements suggested to a more extreme measure). Read More:http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2006/07/strange-woman.html
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