This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports and from business to history and everything in between,

including your story, send them to Our American Stories.com.

They're some of our favorites.

And today we have Faith bringing us the story of Hetty Lamar.

Take it away, Faith.

Famous Hollywood actress Hetty Lamar was born in Austria in 1914.

By the mid-1940s, she became the world's first superstar in Hollywood.

She was known for her striking beauty and her at-time scandalous movie appearances.

Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes wrote a book titled Hetty's Folly, The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hetty Lamar,

the most beautiful woman in the world.

This book helps unpack the life of a woman that perhaps we thought we knew.

Here is Richard Rhodes.

When she walked into a room,

she actually stopped conversations.

People would be startled by her appearance.

The sad tragedy of her life in a way,

though, was that she was also highly intelligent.

And since she was so strikingly beautiful, hardly anyone ever noticed her intelligence.

It wasn't factored into the kind of role she was given in movies, where she usually played some conventionally beautiful woman falling in and out of love with a handsome leading man.

I mean, the tragedy of this woman was that she was, as she pointed out, more than a pretty face.

She liked to say sarcastically, I can tell you how to be glamorous.

All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.

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