Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

  • Screening Dates: 13th June, 6pm  //  20th June, 8pm
  • Starring: Hedy Lamarr
  • Directed by: Alexandra Dean
  • Running time: 90 mins
  • Rating: M
  • Language: English language
Synopsis:

DOCUMENTARY:

In the heyday of the Hollywood studios the popular joke about Hedy Lamarr was that she was so gorgeous that she need not concern herself with acting. Though the young Austrian émigré successfully parlayed her looks into Hollywood star power, she came to see her beauty as a ‘curse’, something that blinded onlookers to a far more vital attribute: a brilliant mind for mechanics. Who knew that she had invented a ‘frequency hopping’ system to conceal allied torpedoes from Nazi locater systems? This science anticipated the technology that underlies WiFi and Bluetooth.

“Lamarr’s story is one of a brilliant woman who was consistently underestimated. It also gives us the clearest possible illustration of why on-screen representation matters – of all the parts that Lamarr was given to play, none of them was as fantastic, or inspirational, as her real life. If she had ever played a woman as brilliant as herself in a film, perhaps the revelation that a star had brains as well as beauty wouldn’t be quite such a, well, bombshell.”      — Pamela Hutchinson, The Guardian