Hedy Lamarr (/ˈhɛdi/; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, November 9, 1914 – January 19, 2000)^[a] was an Austrian and American film actress and inventor.^[1]

After an early and brief film career in Czechoslovakia that included the controversial film Ecstasy (1933 – in which Lamarr is very briefly seen swimming in the nude and running naked), she fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. There, she met MGM head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood, where she became a film star from the late 1930s to the 1950s.^[2]

Lamarr appeared in numerous popular feature films, including Algiers (1938), I Take This Woman (1940), Comrade X (1940), Come Live With Me (1941), H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), and Samson and Delilah (1949).^[3]

At the beginning of World War II, Lamarr and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes, which used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers.^[4]

Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are now incorporated into modern Wi-Fi, CDMA, and Bluetooth technology,^[5][6][7] and this work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.^[4][8]