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Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler (November 9, 1914 - January 19, 2000) was an Austro-Hungarian-born American actress and inventor. She was a film star during Hollywood's Golden Age. After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her first husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. Traveling to London, she met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. She became a film star with her performance in Algiers (1938). Her MGM films include Lady of the Tropics (1939), Boom Town (1940), H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), and White Cargo (1942). Her greatest success was as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Bible-inspired Samson and Delilah (1949). She also acted on television before the release of her final film, The Female Animal (1958). She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. At the beginning of World War II, she and avant-garde composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Hedy was married and divorced six times and had three children. In the last decades of her life, the telephone became her only means of communication with the outside world, even with her children and close friends. She often talked up to six or seven hours a day on the phone, but she spent hardly any time with anyone in person in her final years. Hedy died in Casselberry, Florida, on January 19, 2000, of heart disease. She was 85 years old.
