Actor, Inventor

I was born in Vienna, Austria in 1913. I went into the film business as a teenager, first as a production assistant and then as an actor, and became famous in the 1932 Czech movie Exstase (Ecstasy), which was banned in Germany by chancellor Adolf Hitler because I was a Jew.
My later movie successes include Tortilla Flat and White Cargo in 1942. I acted in approximately 35 movies, and produced the 1946 movie the Strange Woman. Possibly my biggest movie was 1949’s Samson and Delilah, though I turned down roles in Gaslight and Casablanca.
I was married six times. My star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame is at 6247 Hollywood Boulevard.
During World War II, I got together with the composer George Antheil and, driven by our shared desire to help defeat the Nazis, we put our heads together to invent the earliest known form of the telecommunications method known as “frequency hopping,” which used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or to jam. America’s generals were not interested in this invention from Hollywood people, but our method received U.S. patent number 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942, under the name “Secret Communications System.” Frequency hopping is now widely used in cellular phones and other modern technology.
Frequency hopping, also known as spread spectrum, is used in “wireless” LANS, integrated bar code scanners, palmtop computers, radio modem devices for warehousing, digital dispatch, digital cellular telephone communications, etc., and its use is on the verge of potentially explosive commercial development.
However, neither Antheil nor I profited from it, because our patent was allowed to expire decades before the modern wireless boom.