Hedy Lamarr (pron.: /ˈhɛdi/; 9 November 1914 – 19 January 2000) was an Austro-American actress and mathematician, celebrated for her great beauty, who was a major contract star of MGM's "Golden Age." When she worked with Max Reinhardt in Berlin, he called her the "most beautiful woman in Europe" due to her "strikingly dark exotic looks," a sentiment widely shared by her audiences and critics. She gained fame after starring in Gustav Machatý's Ecstasy, a film which featured closeups of her character during orgasm in one scene, as well as full frontal nude shots of her in another scene, both very unusual for the socially conservative period in which the bulk of her career took place.

Mathematically talented, Lamarr also co-invented—with composer George Antheil—an early technique for spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping, necessary for wireless communication from the pre-computer age to the present day. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.