Hedy Lamarr (b. Vienna, Austria-Hungary, 1914 – d. 2000, Casselberry, USA) was an Austrian-born Austro-Hungarian-American film actress and inventor. She was a film star during Hollywood’s golden age. After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, she fled from her first husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer and secretly moved to Paris. Traveling to London, she met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. She became a film star with her performance in Algiers (1938). Her greatest success was as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille’s Bible-inspired Samson and Delilah (1949). At the beginning of World War II, she and avant-garde composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers.
