As recently tipped, guitar legend Jeff Beck is set to drop a new collaborative album with actor-turned-rocker Johnny Depp this summer, and details of the 18 album have now been revealed along with the intriguingly titled lead single, “This Is a Song for Miss Hedly Lamarr.” So who exactly is the titular muse name checked by Depp in his Bowie-esque new song with Beck? If you’re a fan of the golden age of Hollywood filmmaking, you likely already know.
Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna and started off her film career in Czechoslovakia. As the story goes, the actress fled her wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer husband, disguising herself as the maid after a party and secretly moving to Paris. From there, it was a trip to London that changed her life forever, as she met Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM studio, who offered her a Hollywood movie contract.
The studio honcho convinced the actress to change her name to avoid association with her past career, and she chose Lamarr as an ode to silent film star Barbara La Marr. She made her U.S. film debut in the 1938 film Algiers, kicking off a highly successful two-decade film career that included I Take This Woman with Spencer Tracy, Boom Town opposite Clark Gable and Comrade X also starring with Gable. Other standouts included Come Live With Me, Her Highness and the Bellboy and Samson and Delilah, with the latter film being her first shot in technicolor.
![JEFF BECK AND JOHNNY DEPP – THIS IS A SONG FOR MISS HEDY LAMARR [OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO] – CMG Worldwide](https://www.cmgworldwide.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/HedyLamarr-JohnnyDepp-JeffBeck-845x510-1.jpeg)
In addition to her acting career, Lamarr also was an inventor who used her spare time to work on an improved traffic light and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink. She would eventually team with she and composer George Antheil to develop a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. As a result, she’s also a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
In her later years, she dropped out of the public eye. However, fans of a certain age will remember Mel Brooks naming a character in Blazing Saddles Hedley Lamarr, a repeated mistaken identity joke that ran throughout the film. She didn’t find the humor in it, filing a $10 million lawsuit against Warner Bros. in 1974. The studio settled the case out of court. The actress died in 2000 at the age of 85.
Lamarr’s life was the subject of the 2017 film, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story. You can see a trailer below.
