page_title: Hedy Lamarr
section_title: Marriage
hierarchical_section_title: Hedy Lamarr / European film career / Marriage
caption_attribution_description: English: Hedy Lamarr in "The Heavenly Body". Move of MGM (1944) Русский: Хеди Ламарр в фильме МГМ «Райское тело» (1944)
context_page_description: Hedy Lamarr, born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, was an Austrian-American actress, inventor, and film producer. She was part of 30 films in an acting career spanning 28 years, and co-invented an early version of frequency-hopping spread spectrum.
  Lamarr was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, and acted in a number of Austrian, German, and Czech films in her brief early film career, including the controversial Ecstasy. In 1937, she fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, secretly moving to Paris and then onward to London. There she met Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood, where he began promoting her as "the world's most beautiful woman".
  She became a star with her performance in Algiers, her first film made in the United States. She starred opposite Clark Gable in Boom Town and Comrade X, and Jimmy Stewart in Come Live with Me and Ziegfeld Girl. Her other MGM films include Lady of the Tropics, H.M. Pulham, Esq., as well as Crossroads and White Cargo; she was also borrowed by Warner Bros. for The Conspirators, and by RKO for Experiment Perilous.
context_section_description: Kiesler also played a number of stage roles, including a starring one in Sissy, a play about Empress Elisabeth of Austria produced in Vienna in early 1933, just as Ecstasy premiered. It won accolades from critics.
  Admirers sent roses to her dressing room and tried to get backstage to meet Kiesler. She sent most of them away, including an insistent Friedrich Mandl. He became obsessed with getting to know her. Mandl was a Viennese arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She fell for his charming and fascinating personality, partly due to his immense wealth. Her parents, both of Jewish descent, did not approve, as Mandl had ties to Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, and later, German Führer Adolf Hitler, but they could not stop their headstrong daughter.
  On August 10, 1933, at the age of 18, Kiesler married Mandl, then 33. The son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Mandl insisted that she convert to Catholicism before their wedding in Vienna Karlskirche. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, Mandl is described as an extremely controlling husband. He strongly objected to her having been filmed in the simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Castle Schwarzenau in the remote Waldviertel near the Czech border.
  Mandl had close social and business ties to the Italian government, selling munitions to the country, and, despite his own part-Jewish descent, had ties to the Nazi regime of Germany. Kiesler accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and she became interested in nurturing her latent talent in science.
  Finding her marriage to Mandl eventually unbearable, Kiesler decided to flee her husband as well as her country. According to her autobiography, she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris. Friedrich Otto's account says that she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party where the influential "Nazi prince" Ernst Stahremberg attended, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage:
  I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife. ... He was the absolute monarch in his marriage. ... I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own.
caption: Hedy Lamarr in The Heavenly Body (1944)
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