Hedy Lamarr (/ ̍ h ɛ d i /; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, 9 November 1914 – 19 January 2000)[a] was an Austrian and American inventor and film actress.[1] After an early and brief film career in Germany, which included a controversial love-making scene in the film Ecstasy (1933), she fled her husband and secretly moved to Paris. While there, she met MGM head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood where she became a film star from the late 1930s to the 1950s.[2] Mayer and the studio cast her in glamorous parts alongside popular leading men, and promoted her as the "world's most beautiful woman."

During her film career, Lamarr co-invented the technology for spread spectrum and frequency hopping communications with composer George Antheil.[3] This new technology became important to America's military during World War II because it was used in controlling torpedoes. Those inventions have more recently been incorporated into Wi-Fi, CDMA and Bluetooth technology,[4][5] [6] and led to her being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.[3][7]

Lamarr appeared in numerous popular feature films, including Algiers (1938) with Charles Boyer, I Take This Woman (1940) with Spencer Tracy, Comrade X (1940) with Clark Gable, Come Live With Me (1941) with James Stewart, H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941) with Robert Young, and Samson and Delilah (1949) with Victor Mature.[8]