Tuesday, 19 January 2021—DAY FIVE

 

Welcome back to BOOKMAN'S MOVIE SCREENSHOT GAME.  Today is the Monday game even though it's Tuesday, and that means today is another easy game to start the week.

ON THIS DAY IN MOVIE HISTORY, JANUARY 19, …

… actor and woman of many talents Hedy Lamarr died in Casselberry, Florida, in 2000.

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American audiences gasped when she first appeared onscreen.  Only a small number of actors have been universally called "the most beautiful woman in the world."  Hedy Lamarr, Elizabeth Taylor, and Ava Gardner come to my mind.  In that order.

She was born Hedwig (nicknamed Hedy) Eva Marie Kiesler in Vienna, Austria, in 1914.  Kiesler studied under Max Reinhardt and played numerous roles on stage.  She also had a few small roles in films between 1930 and 1933, the year Adolf Hitler consolidated his dictatorship and announced the Third Reich in Germany.  In that year she earned her first starring role, in the notorious German film Ecstasy.  In one scene she appears with full frontal nudity, and in a different scene the camera focuses on her face as her character orgasms.  Hitler banned the film in Germany.  The Hays Code forbade its showing in the U.S.

After a typical stage performance in Vienna, Kiesler's male admirers would wait in queues that stretched out of her dressing room, down a corridor, and out onto the sidewalk.  One such admirer was particularly pushy, refusing to take no for an answer when he asked to take her on dates.  She eventually acquiesced and eventually came to appreciate the man.  But the man, arms merchant and munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl, had ties to Mussolini and Hitler.  Mandl pressed Kiesler to marry him. She agreed, despite his ultimatum that she convert to Catholicism or there would be no marriage.  Kiesler's parents could not change her mind, and she married Mandl in 1934.

His controlling nature doomed the marriage, and in 1935 Kiesler diguised herself as a maid and fled Mandl, fled Austria, and went to Paris.

The year 1938 was momentous for Kiesler.  In London she met Louis B. Mayer who had gone there to scout talent.  After some hard bargaining on her part, (he offered $125 per week but eventually agreed to $500), she signed a multi-year contract with M.G.M.

Shortly afterward, at the behest of Mayer who worried about her name's association with the banned Ecstasy, she changed her surname from Kiesler to Lamarr.  And after the anchluss in Austria, Lamarr interrupted her work on her first American film, Algiers, with Charles Boyer, to return home and help her mother flee the Nazis.  [Part II tomorrow.]

Here are today's buffer images.

Carole Lombard

Elizabeth Taylor

All right, everyone.  Are you ready to play?  Then let's play!  Good luck and have fun!

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