Hedy Lamarr: Hollywood glamour, Jewish roots

She was called “the most beautiful woman in the world”, but Hedy Lamarr was so much more than a pretty face. Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on November 9, 1914 in Vienna, Hedy grew up in a bourgeois, assimilated Jewish family. Her father was a banker with a scientific mind, her mother, a pianist from an upper-class Hungarian-Jewish family.

Judaism wasn’t the centrepiece of their household, but it was woven into who they were, and in the Europe of the 1930s and ’40s, it became impossible to ignore.

As an adult, Hedy’s Jewish identity didn’t really match the life she was living. Her first husband, Fritz Mandl, had close social and business ties to the Italian government and ties to the Nazi regime, and Lamarr wrote that the dictators of both countries attended lavish parties at the Mandl home.

After arriving in London in 1937, she met Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM. According to stories, it was Mayer who persuaded her to change her name to Hedy Lamarr, choosing the surname in homage to the beautiful silent film star Barbara La Marr.

As the Holocaust consumed Europe, Hedy was acutely aware of what was happening to Jewish communities, including many of her childhood friends and relations, although she did manage to bring her mother to America. The war was personal. And it shaped, at least in part, her extraordinary decision to channel her intellect into something that mattered.