Lamarr, Hedy (1914–2000)

Austrian-born US film actor. Lamarr catapulted to fame in the early 1930s when she appeared nude in Extase/Ecstasy (1932) as an adulterous young woman who falls for a soldier. A contract with US studio giant MGM followed and Lamarr became typecast as the elegant adventuress in such films as Algiers (1938) and White Cargo (1942). As the eponymous female lead in the biblical epic Samson and Delilah (1949), playing opposite the US film actor Victor Mature, she featured in her biggest commercial success. However, as her career declined in the post-war years and she became increasingly disillusioned with the roles she was offered, her onscreen appearances became more and more intermittent, leading to her retirement from the film business in the late 1950s.

Lamarr was a student of the Austrian theatre director Max Reinhardt while in Berlin. Before her move to Hollywood she worked in both German and Czechoslovakian cinema. Among her other films are Comrade X (1940), A Lady Without Passport (1950), and My Favorite Spy (1951). She famously turned down the leads for the Hollywood blockbusters Casablanca and Gaslight, both of which would see the Swedish actor Ingrid Bergman cement her international celebrity.