Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

Wednesday 22 September at 7.30pm

Alexandra Dean│USA│2017│90 mins│M nudity

As well as being one of Hollywood’s most beautiful stars, Hedy Lamarr was an ingenious and talented inventor whose pioneering work helped revolutionise modern communications.

“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? (The science anticipated the technology that underlies WiFi and Bluetooth.) Her international career began in scandal… In her later years her plastic surgery provided further fodder for tabloid gossip. Alexandra Dean’s timely documentary draws extensively on a previously unpublished audio interview from 1990… This fully rounded portrait challenges the reductive notions about beauty vs. brains that she, like so many other shimmering screen sirens, have been forced to endure.” – Sandra Reid, NZIFF 2018