American actor Heather Massie in the role of Hedi Lamarr.

Theatre / Hedy! The Life and Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, written by Heather Massie, directed by Blake Walton and Leslie Kincaid Burby. At The Street Theatre, August 31. Reviewed by LEN POWER.

The thought of Hedy Lamarr conjures up an image of a glamorous movie star of the 1940s and ’50s. Born in Austria, she began her film career in Czechoslovakia. Her performance in a controversial 1933 erotic romantic drama, Ecstasy, led to a film career in Hollywood where she became a star in the 1938 romantic drama, Algiers, with Charles Boyer.

Many other successful films followed, and she is probably best known for her performance as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1949 religious epic, Samson and Delilah.

Lamarr was more than just a successful, glamorous actress. At the start of World War II, she co-invented, with George Antheil, a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that could defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers. Although granted a patent for their invention in 1942, Lamarr was told her time could be better spent selling war bonds as she was a celebrity. The technology was not used until after the war and then independently of their patent.

The play, Hedy!, begins with film and images projected on a screen showing the glamour of the woman once promoted as “the most beautiful woman in the world”. Some of those images show her, ironically, in seductive poses with military hardware, including torpedoes.

The writer, Heather Massie, also plays the actress in this one-person show. She looks extraordinarily like Lamarr and, as the character, realising she has somehow time-warped into Canberra, she creates an immediate and charming rapport with individuals in the audience.

The play is cleverly written, directed and performed very well. It runs nearly two hours without a break and the story of this woman’s life is constantly entertaining.

As Lamarr, she tells the story of her life from her childhood in Austria, her film career in Europe and the US, her many marriages, inventions and later life. Her colourful story is fascinating and told well by Massie, who also convincingly takes on the voices of other characters in her story such as actors Charles Boyer and George Sanders and Bette Davis, her husbands and acquaintances.

While her Hollywood film career is an interesting story, it is her work as an inventor that becomes the most interesting aspect of the play. At one point, Lamarr remembers the difficulty getting influential people in that male-dominated era to listen to her ideas. One wonders what she could have been capable of in a more accepting time.

Lamarr never made money from her patent, giving it to the US Navy in wartime to help defeat the Nazis. These days as we reach for our mobile phones, we don’t realise how much current technology owes to her invention. Her contributions as an inventor were eventually recognised but not until the 1990s, shortly before her death in 2000.

Massie’s performance as Lamarr is magical. She commands the stage with her personalised story of this gifted woman who achieved fame as both a glamorous actress and inventor.