Trivia I came across while looking for informations on rivers which formed the Iron Curtain Iron Curtain . Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Vienna about half a year before the outbreak of the First World War. Later known as the screen star Hedy Lamarr, the clever Austrian would play an interesting off-screen role as an inventor in the Second World War — on the side of her adopted US homeland. This is just one of many facts that make Lamarr's biography quite unlike that of most film stars.

While she shocked European society and gained notoriety with her 10-minute nude swimming scene in the 1933 Austrian-Czech film Ecstasy (still appearing in the credits as Hedy Kiesler), she is perhaps best known today because of the Mel Brooks Western parody, Blazing Saddles (1973). Brooks used the running gag of a villainous character named “Hedley Lamarr” (Harvey Korman) who had to constantly correct people who kept calling him “Hedy.” (It was in that same classic film that Madeline Kahn masterfully portrayed a lisping spoof of Marlene Dietrich.) But such superficial recognition does an injustice to the attractive and highly intelligent Lamarr, who made her last film the year I was born, 1958 AD.