“When I start to fear death, I order a massage and it goes away.”

An Austrian-American actor, inventor, and filmmaker noted for provocative roles in movies like Samson & Delilah and A Lady Of the Tropics and, later, for bucking convention by producing her own independent films, a slap in the face to the Hollywood studio system that resented the idea of a woman taking the initiative to create movies of her own. During World War II, Lamarr patented a special radio signal modulator intended to make it harder for the Nazis to decode allied messages, technology that formed the basis for future cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth communication.