Hedy Lamarr, the raven-haired screen siren known for her exceptional beauty which had been described by the legendary Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper as "orchidaceous", was found dead at her home in suburban Orlando, on January 19th. She was 86.
In her heyday, which ranged from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, she starred in 25 films including Algiers, Comrade X, Boom Town and Tortilla Flat. Her greatest commercial success and first technicolour film was Samson and Delilah. Whatever critics said about her acting or the public about her notoriety, her beauty was universally praised. "My face has been my misfortune," she wrote in her 1966 autobiography, Ecstasy and Me. "It has attracted six unsuccessful marriage partners. It has attracted all the wrong people into my boudoir and brought me tragedy and heartache for five decades. My face is a mask I cannot remove. I must always live with it. I curse it."
Unimpressed with roles in which she was required only to look pretty, she was often quoted as saying: "Any girl can be glamorous; all you have to do is stand still and look stupid."
Born Hedwig Kiesler, the daughter of a Viennese banker, young "Hedy" sprang into international consciousness at 17 when she performed some nude scenes in the controversial 1933 Czechoslovakian film Ecstasy.
To Hedy Lamarr, the film was "a harmless little sex romp about a sweet young thing who marries an older man [who was] unable to consummate the marriage on the wedding night".
Her first film, Algiers, according to one-time Los Angeles Times Hollywood columnist Donald Hough, "established her as the number one desert-island choice of the average American male". But she continued to fight for more serious parts, such as Comrade X in 1940.
Although she didn't obtain US citizenship until 1953, she was fiercely pro-American during the second World War, selling war bonds, washing dishes and dancing with men in uniform at the Hollywood USO canteen, and offering her new homeland her frequency invention to be used to direct torpedoes at moving ships. When the public was encouraged by the National Inventors Council to submit ideas for defence devices, she discussed her concept with Antheil, the composer. On leaving, she scrawled her phone number in lipstick on his windshield. The two met the next evening to work out the technology.
When she married her fourth husband, Acapulco nightclub owner Ernest "Ted" Stauffer, she publicly sold much of her furniture and Hollywood mementos from her Beverly Hills home and moved to Mexico.
She later moved to Houston, the home of husband number five, Texas oilman W. Howard Lee. That marriage lasted seven years, during which she made her final films, The Loves of Three Queens in 1953, The Story of Mankind in 1957 and The Female Animal in 1958.
Her sixth and final marriage, to attorney Lewis W. Boies Jr., who was six years her junior, lasted from March 4th, 1963, until their separation on October 15th, 1964.
Hedy Lamarr appeared to live her life on her own terms and without regret. She often joked about flaws such as her inability to choose good scripts. She had turned down Casablanca, for example, which became a stellar hit for Ingrid Bergman.
"When I die," she once told a friend, summing up her devil-may-care life, "I want on my gravestone: `Thank you very much for a colourful life.' "
Hedy Lamaar: born 1913; died January, 2000