By Joanne Bailey-Boorsma
When we think of an inventor, we don’t normally think of a Hollywood bombshell who was mostly self-taught.
But Hedy Lamarr, known for her role as Delilah in the Cecil B. Demille’s “Samson and Delilah,” the highest-grossing film of 1949, was both the bombshell and the inventor. With composer and pianist George Antheil, she developed a device that allowed for frequency-hopping to keep the signals of torpedoes from being tracked or jammed. This system would become the basis of cell phone and bluetooth technology.
Lamarr’s life is the subject of the 2017 documentary “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story.” The film’s writer and director Alexandra Dean sits down with Kamla Bhatt from “The Kamla Show” to talk about the film and Lamarr’s life. This edition of “The Kamla Show,” which is being aired by WKTV in honor of Women’s History Month, will air on WKTV 25 at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 20; 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, March 21; and 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 23.
“I made this film because when we close our eyes and think of an inventor we don’t think of a woman,” Dean said. “We don’t typically think of anything but a very certain type of man. We even might think of his pocket protector and the look on his face. We have a very specific idea of the people who shape our world and made it the way it is today.”
Lamarr, who was the inspiration for Snow White and Cat Woman, emigrated from her home in Austria to escape a bad marriage. Before coming to America, she was already known for the scandalous European film “Ecstasy.” She became a Hollywood icon starring with such legends as James Stewart and Cary Grant.
But being pegged as a seductress and with limited speaking parts, Lamarr was bored and turned to inventing. Her first husband had been an arms dealer and so she was familiar with weapons like torpedoes. An ad for the Inventors Council encouraged her to think about how she could help her adopted home of the United States and she eventually paired up with Antheil. In her later years, Lamarr became a recluse, impoverished and almost forgotten.
Dean said she was looking for a person who broke the mold of the traditional “inventor” and found Richard Rhodes book “Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Women in the World.” The book lead to Dean finally finding not only an inspiration to her movie but to life as well.
“Someone said to me that ‘Hedy Lamarr wasn’t only thinking outside of the box, she didn’t even know the box existed,’” Dean said. “That is how Hedy Lamarr inspires me. Why do we care that there is even a box. Why not just live outside the box. That is the message she gave me.”
The “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story” has won awards at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Nantucket Film Festival, San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival. For more on the film, visit click here.
