Gal Gadot said eyeing role in series about Jewish actress, inventor Hedy Lamarr

Israeli star in talks with Showtime to play leading role in production detailing life and career of Hollywood legend, reports Variety

By ToI Staff 7 August 2018, 1:11 pm

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Gal Gadot arrives for the Oscars ceremony at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles, March 4, 2018, (Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

Israeli actress Gal Gadot is close to inking a deal with US television network Showtime to produce and play the lead role in a series about the life and career of Jewish movie star and inventor Hedy Lamarr.

“Wonder Woman” star Gadot and her husband Jaron Varsano would be executive producers of the limited series, Variety reported Monday, citing sources familiar with the developments.

Showtime has not formally signed up for the series and declined to comment on the report, the entertainment website said.

Lamarr was one of the most famous Jews of her age. Born Hedwig Kiesler in 1941, she fled Europe for Hollywood in 1938, and later helped her mother escape from Nazi-ruled Austria.

Actress Hedy Lamarr on the set of the movie ‘Samson and Delilah,’ in 1949. (AP)

In the 1933 film “Ecstasy,” she was shown running naked through the countryside. Lamarr later played some of Hollywood’s most iconic female roles from 1938 to the 1950s. She stared in classics like “Samson and Delilah,” “Boom Town,” and “Come Live With Me,” and was promoted in the 1940s as the “most beautiful woman in the world.”

But Lamarr was not overly impressed with her on-screen accomplishments or her looks, commenting that “any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Hedy Lamarr poses for a photo in her apartment in New York, 1979. (AP)

During World War II, she worked with a friend on developing radio technologies that could be used by American forces to communicate despite Nazi jamming.

The result was a frequency-hopping radio technology she patented that became an intrinsic feature of modern-day digital communication technologies such as Wifi and Bluetooth.

She was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014 (she died in 2000, age 86) in recognition of this work.

In 2015 Google honored her memory with a homepage doodle on her 101st birthday, November 10.

According to Variety, the Showtime series would also include as executive producers Sarah Treem, the creator of “The Affair,” as well as Warren Littlefield, who served in that position for Hulu’s hit “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Fargo” from FX.