Popular search engine Google on Monday remembered Austrian actress, scientist Hedy Lamarr on her 101st birthday with an animated doodle.
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Lamarr appeared in numerous popular feature films and 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. A subsequent German film, Exstase, brought her to the attention of Hollywood producers, and she soon signed a contract with MGM.
During her first marriage, Lamarr developed an interest in applied science and utilized this knowledge as an inventor.
“Lamarr’s own story reads like a movie script: bored by the film industry and feeling typecast, Lamarr was more interested in helping the Allied war effort as World War II broke out than in the roles she was being offered”. Lamarr along with her friend, George Antheil, used the principles of how pianos worked to identify a way to prevent German submarines from jamming Ally radio signals.
A few of her films include an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat (1942), White Cargo (1942), Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949) and The Female Animal (1957).
Lamarr’s work on “frequency hopping”, made her an exponent of new-age technology which paved the way for modern day technologies such as Bluetooth, Global Positioning System and WiFi that help us connect with the world.
After a stressful last days, Lamarr died on January 19, 2000.
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The doodle is an animation telling the story of Hedy Lamarr’s life, running parallel to the soundtrack created by composer Adam Ever-Hadani.
