Hedy Lamarr died at age 85 in Casselberry, Florida, United States.
Hedy Lamarr died on 19 January 2000 in Casselberry, Florida, at the age of 85. By the time of her death, she had lived for decades largely out of the public eye, having retired from acting in the 1950s and later leading a reclusive life, rarely giving interviews or public appearances in her final years.
Her death prompted renewed international attention to her remarkable dual legacy: as one of the most glamorous and celebrated actresses of Hollywood's golden age, starring in films such as Algiers (1938), Samson and Delilah (1949), and White Cassock, and as the co-inventor of a frequency-hopping spread-spectrum communication technology that laid conceptual groundwork for modern wireless systems including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
In the years following her death, recognition of her scientific contributions accelerated substantially, culminating in honors such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award (1997, awarded shortly before her death) and her posthumous induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. Documentaries, including Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (2017), further cemented public understanding of her overlooked technical legacy.
Her ashes were scattered in the Vienna Woods in Austria, in accordance with her wishes, symbolically returning her to the city of her birth. Her life remains a powerful case study in the historical marginalization of women's intellectual contributions and the eventual, if delayed, correction of that record.