Hedy Lamarr Hedy Lamarr was born in Vienna, Austria on November 9, 1913. She was born a jewish girl in a well off family, her father being a bank director and her mother a concert pianist. Her father was Emil Kiesler and her mother was Gertrud Kiesler. She was educated at Vienna and then in Switzerland as a teenager. She started acting in 1930 and was in many movies before making a film called Extase (or Ecstasy) in Czechoslovakia in 1932; it was released the following year. The film told the simple story of a young woman whose husband is impotent, causing her to seek out the companionship of a younger man. She first married in the december of 1933 to Friedrich Mandl. An often-repeated story holds that Mandl tried to buy and destroy every