This is an unusual and revelatory documentary about Hedy LaMarr, the beautiful movie star from Europe who became a Hollywood legend in the 1940s and 1950s. Her story is remarkable, because she turned out to be so much deeper, smarter and more talented than her two-dimensional image as a female sex symbol and celebrity gossip topic would have suggested.
As a young immigrant actress from Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, she was driven to help the American war effort, and did so, by leading war bond drives where she helped raise millions of dollars for the war.
But her real interest was inventing. In the early 1940s, working with an inventing partner, she came up with an innovation which was intended to help solve a technical problem relating to torpedo guidance systems, for which she was awarded a U.S. patent, although it was never used during the war.
Later, though, researchers and engineers came upon her idea of "frequency skipping"-- rapidly changing the frequency of a radio signal to prevent jamming and monitoring -- and applied it to many of the electronic and communications technologies that are now foundational to our modern world. The profits from her invention are now in the many billions of dollars, although she never saw any of it, because her patent had expired by the time others wanted to use it.
A surprising and overdue appreciation of a brilliant and complicated woman, who struggled throughout her life to be recognized as something more than just another pretty face. Highly recommended.
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