The first and most scandalous full-length female nude in film history was starred by the Viennese actress Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) in the 1933 film Ecstasy . Shot in Czechoslovakia and directed by Gustav Machaty in 1933, the film narrates the relationship adulteress of a beautiful young woman married to an impotent old man. Lamarr, whose birth name was Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, appears as she came into the world swimming in a pool for 10 minutes and almost as many minutes running through a forest in a dipped ball. It was also the first time on a screen that a woman pretended to have an orgasm .
Despite religious criticism and outrage from puritans, the film was a great commercial success in those countries where it was seen uncensored and catapulted actress Hedy Lamarr to fame, who began a career in Hollywood. Interestingly, in addition to being an actress, Hedy Lamarr was a co-inventor of the first version of the spread spectrum that would lead to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology . And it is that Lamarr, who was the daughter of a Central European Jewish marriage – her father was a banker and her mother a pianist – stood out from a young age for her intelligence and was considered by her teachers as gifted. She began to study engineering at the age of 16, but three years later, in 1933, she left the career attracted by her artistic streak, and began in the Berlin theater as a student of director Max Reinhardt.
Her life was endless adventures, because after making the film, her parents married her against her will to the arms industry magnate Friedrich Mandl , also a Jew but a supplier of weapons to Hitler and Mussolini. Mandl tried to get hold of all the copies of the film in which Hedy wore her full nude and subjected her to constant surveillance, practically locked up at home. In her memoirs, she said that she could only bathe or undress when her husband was by her side , stalking her.
At the same time, Hedy took advantage of her semi-enclosure to continue her engineering studies and use her intelligence to obtain from her husband’s customers and suppliers the details of the weapons technology of the time. He then passed the information on to the United States authorities years later. He was also able to devise and patent, in the 1940s, the frequency switching technique, which would bring him back to fame in the last years of his life.
During her confinement she maintained a sentimental relationship with her assistant , who helped her escape from her husband through a restaurant bathroom window and managed to get to Paris. Then he went to London, where he met Louis B. Mayer, the Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) businessman. She sold her jewelry and fled to the United States, on the same ship as Mayer, to convince him to hire her as an actress. When he made landfall, he already had a seven-year contract and a new name: Hedy Lamarr. Then he married five more times. In short, a whole character.
In Spain, the first woman to do a full nude on screen was María José Cantudo in the film La Trastienda , by Jorge Grau, in 1975.
