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Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Hedy Lamarr ( 9 November 1914 – 19 January 2000) was an Austrian actress and inventor, celebrated for her great beauty, who was a contract star of MGM's "Golden Age." Mathematically gifted, she and composer George Antheil invented an early technique for spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping, necessary for wireless communication from the pre-computer age to the present day. When Lamarr worked with Max Reinhardt in Berlin, he called her the "most beautiful woman in Europe" due to her "strikingly dark exotic looks", a sentiment widely shared by her audiences and critics. She gained fame after starring in Gustav Machatý's Ecstasy, a 1933 film which featured closeups of her character during orgasm in one scene, as well as full frontal nude shots of her in another scene, both very unusual for the socially conservative period in which the bulk of her career took place.