Okay, sorry about the headline. While in a rush to report I thought that The Hollywood Reporter was saying that Rachel Weisz would be playing Hedley Lamarr in a new movie. In fact she’s playing Hedy Lamarr. You can see how a mistake was made.
Lamarr was a movie star back in the day, and was known for her beauty as well as her ludicrous name. But don’t expect the film, Face Value, to be a standard Hollywood glamour biopic. The movie, to be directed by Amy Redford (yes, she’s his daughter), will be about Lamarr’s career as a… scientist.
No, seriously. While Lamarr was a movie star (starring in films like Cecil B DeMille’s Sampson and Delilah), she was also an inventor. Along with her neighbor, avant garde composer George Antheil, Lamarr developed frequency hopping, originally used to help make radio-guided torpedoes harder to jam (it was 1941), but later it became the basis of the wireless technology we take for granted today.