Actress more than just a pretty face

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This article was published 10/01/2018 (3195 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Any girl can be glamorous,” Hollywood screen siren Hedy Lamarr once declared. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

With waves of raven hair, immaculately arched eyebrows and perfectly symmetrical features, Lamarr was billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world” in the 1930s. She was naturally glamorous, but she had a very hard time standing still and looking stupid.

Born in Vienna to a cultured, highly assimilated Jewish family and married as a teen to a munitions manufacturer, she fled Austria — and her increasingly unhappy marriage — in 1937. Later, working in Hollywood as the newest discovery of Louis B. Mayer, she watched helplessly as Europe descended into war and German U-boats brought down ships bringing desperate refugees across the Atlantic.

Labouring at the MGM studios during the day, she spent her nights designing a secure communications system for radio-controlled torpedoes, hoping to assist the Allied war effort. With American avant-garde composer George Antheil — who, believe it or not, was inspired by his work with player pianos — she developed a frequency-hopping transmission technique, basically foreseeing the technology that would enable the development of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS systems.

Lamarr’s double life would sound like the kind of entertaining but preposterous Hollywood adventure she often starred in — if it weren’t actually true.

In Bombshell, filmmaker Alexandra Dean pays passionate tribute to the complicated life of a complex woman. A documentary producer making her directorial debut, Dean uses a fluid — if occasionally conventional and stretched-out — blend of film footage, archival material and animation, along with interviews with historians, journalists, friends and family members.

Dean also relies heavily on former Forbes reporter Fleming Meeks, who taped hours of telephone interviews with the actress when she was in her 70s and living as a near recluse. It is Lamarr’s voice, removed from the burden of her physical beauty, that conveys the clearest sense of her character.

We hear the frustrations of a strong-willed woman who, at the zenith of her fame, was seen by everyone but never seen for herself. At age five, Lamarr had taken apart and then reassembled her mechanical toys. This talent for tinkering and experimenting never went away, but her work was mostly discounted because she was a woman, and an impossibly beautiful woman at that.

Lamarr ran through six husbands. After the war, she became increasingly erratic, possibly the result of amphetamine addiction, a frequent legacy of a studio system in which stars were given one set of pills to wake up and another set to go to sleep.

Although she was a compelling screen presence, able to play femmes fatales with a slightly ironical and arch flair, Lamarr was stuck in typecast and limited roles. Later, she became a celebrity guest on TV talk shows, often treated cruelly as a sort of parody of Golden Age glamour. As she aged, Lamarr pursued increasingly unwise plastic surgeries — though, characteristically, she was full of advice for her surgeons about where and how to cut to minimize visible scarring.

Two narrative trajectories run through the bittersweet Bombshell. One is the idiosyncratic, often unlikely tale of a restless, rebellious and highly individual woman who “created her own reality,” as fellow actress and superfan Diane Kruger suggests. The other is the story of a woman in Hollywood valued solely for her beauty when young and then scorned as she grows old, which is — unfortunately — all too believable and all too common.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca