by Daniel Crooke
Fresh off her Best Actress victory at this year's Cannes Film Festival for Fatih Akin's In the Fade (as well as Germany's official decision to submit the film as their Foreign Language Oscars play) Diane Kruger is out for revenge once more - this time, to rewrite the half-finished story of Classical Hollywood Cinema icon Hedy Lamarr for a new miniseries in which she plans to produce and star. Long defined by her immaculate beauty in films such as Samson and Delilah and Algiers, Lamarr's brains have shone a longer, even more luminous legacy on the modern world thanks to her penchant for invention. While ignored at the time, her work laid the bedrock for much of modern communication - including WiFi and Bluetooth...
Fans of Karina Longworth's addicting podcast of Hollywood mythmaking, You Must Remember This, or the new documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story are already familiar with the tale of Lamarr's WWII-era patent on frequency-hopping radio signal - filed while under contract to MGM as a regular presence on the silver screen. Kruger's in-development miniseries stands to reach an even larger audience and revive Lamarr's onscreen legacy too.
While Kruger did shrewdly portray a glamorous actress moonlighting as a special agent working to take down the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds - my personal favorite performance in that film - the affinity between actresses goes deeper than these double lives, each going up against an industry that has shoehorned them based on their looks. It's exciting to know that while Kruger continues to upend shallow expectations through her brilliantly dimensioned performanes, she's working to lift up another actress who shattered the male gaze through her own genius.