"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."
1940s Hollywood screen siren Hedy Lamarr was so much more than a glamourous stage prop.
The Austrian-born beauty was also an inventor who patented an idea that would eventually lay the foundation for modern conveniences such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS.
Today would have been Lamarr’s 101st birthday, and Google have paid homage to this remarkable woman with an animated clip on their search page.
"She's just so cool," Jennifer Hom of Google, who created the animated clip, told CNN.com. "She was very complicated and very accomplished at the same time."
Lamarr began her acting career in Europe, were she gained notoriety for her role in the Czech film Ecstacy. The tale of a neglected young wife married to an older man, the film attracted controversy for a close-up of Lamarr’s face as she enjoyed an orgasm, as well as a few, albeit brief, nude scenes.
In the late 1930s, Lamarr fled an abusive marriage and landed up in Hollywood, where she signed to MGM and frequently played an exotic seductress on screen. In her autobiography, Lamarr claims she dressed up as a maid and fled her controlling spouse. One legend suggests she convinced him to allow her to wear all her jewellry to a dinner, and then escaped.
Lamarr was a regular on the big screen in the 1940s, but her true passion was science and engineering.
With World War 2 in full swing, she teamed up with composer George Antheil to develop a frequency-hopping system - based on the keys of a piano - that would prevent enemies from intercepting radio messages. That invention was way ahead of it’s time, but would eventually come to form the basis of wireless communication.
Lamarr was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. She died in 2000, at the age of 86.
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Entertainment Reporter