Very excited to add this 1933 portrait of actor / inventor Hedy Lamarr to the Star Dot Star archive. Rendered with an overstriking technique by M. Hornack, the work is likely still in its original, quadruple-matted frame.
By the 1920s, rendering stars of stage and screen in glyph-form had already become a small trend, and as Andrew Heisel wrote for Jezebel back in 2015, “In the spring of 1933, the best-selling fan magazine of the day, New Movie, organized a typewriter art contest...” Was this work by M. Hornack perhaps intended for entry?
Lamarr is a fascinating person. In the late 1990s, the Electronic Frontier Foundation honored her, then age 84, for her co-creation of frequency hopping. Working with the avant-garde composer George Antheil, Lammar used the 88 frequencies of piano keys to help the US military combat the signal jamming of their radio-controlled munitions. Below is their patent, you can read the details here.
If you want to learn all about Lamarr’s incredible life, there’s a great documentary from a few years ago, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story; several clips are up via PBS. The BBC has a similar doc, Hollywood’s Brightest Bombshell, which you can view in YouTube as of this posting.
