"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid." - Hedy Lamarr
I love Hollywood... but I really love old Hollywood. So, since Zombieslayer has the hot women of today covered, I'm going to look back at the hot women of yesterday.
First up - Hedy Lamarr. I never knew just how hot she was until I read a biography on her. After that...I was enamoured.
Hedy Lamarr - or rather, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler - was born in Vienna, Austria in 1913. She did some German and Czech movies and gained worldwide buzz after doing a now-famous nude scene in a movie called 'Extase.' Hollywood came calling soon after.
She played sultry roles in Algiers(1938), Lady of the Tropics (1939), Boom Town (1940), Tortilla Flat (1942), White Cargo (1942), and many others. She was known as 'The Most Beautiful Woman In Films.'
All that makes her plenty hot in my book, but she was also very smart which makes her downright smokin'.
During the war, Lamarr met an avant-garde musician, George Antheil, at a party and they started talking. Legend has it that she was so interested in their conversation that she left her phone number written in lipstick on his windshield. Perhaps that's true - perhaps not. 
What is true, is that the two did continue to talk and came up with a system for alternating a radio signal over a series of 88 frequencies in order to prevent it being jammed. Known as frequency hopping, it was intended to be used for torpedo guidance. Lamarr received a patent for it in 1942. The navy didn't use it in that application, however, it was later used in military communication applications and was first applied in action during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is the basis for cel phone technology today and is known as spread spectrum technology.
Also, despite being born in Austria, Lamarr was a strong supporter of the Allied war efforts. She has the distinction of raising the most money at a single event to sell war bonds. She raised $7 million dollars.
Anyway, she was beautiful and smart...a deadly combination.
"Perhaps my problem in marriage--and it is the problem of many women--was to want both intimacy and independence. It is a difficult line to walk, yet both needs are important to a marriage." - Hedy Lamarr
7 comments:
Funny, I studied her patent, but never studied her. I looooove smart women. :)
Hey Shawn, definitely keep this up. Would love to see this a weekly, or bi-weekly thing. I got the new ones covered. :)
I'd love to see this too! Women probably appreciate this even more than men.
No? ;)
So much for my "you can't possibly expect me to be smart AND beautiful" defense... drat.
Thanks for bursting my bubble ;)
ok... just backtracked and read the previous post... Guess you already covered that. See why I never leave comments????
Oh well, at least I'm still beautiful...
Did you know that she sued Mel Brooks over the Hedly Lamarr character in Blazing Saddles? I can't remember if she was successful or not.
Yeah, apparently later in life she sued just about everybody... She sued Corel for using her image on their software packaging (they apparently thought she was already dead...ooops) and that pretty much set her up for the rest of her days. She was an interesting woman for sure.
She sued Corel for using her image on their software packaging (they apparently thought she was already dead...ooops) and that pretty much set her up for the rest of her days.
Corel? That's too funny. I actually made $500 on Corel stock. You remember when they shot up to $30? I sold mine right away. They're probably a penny stock nowadays. I haven't checked. It's too bad, because at one point, they were a seriously pro-Linux company.
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