Hedy Lamarr wasn’t just another pretty face. Even when it came to pretty faces.

But in a time when movies from the 1960s might as well have been released at the same time as the Bayeux tapestry, Lamarr—born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Austria in 1914—was an actress from Hollywood’s golden age of the ’30s and ’40s whose onscreen star quality was nearly as bright as her offscreen scientific brilliance. That’s why Google honored “the most beautiful woman in the world” with a signature doodle Monday on the anniversary of her 101st birthday.

The CliffsNotes version of Lamarr’s life is that she was a Hollywood starlet who also happened to help create a technology that is the basis of modern wireless data communication, something users such as battleship61 have been posting about on Reddit for years. While that’s no small achievement, it also undersells just how talented, motivated, and groundbreaking this polymath, who died in 2000, was in any of the ventures she undertook.

Here are a few more fascinating facts about Hedy Lamarr, an actress who was as much brains as she was beauty.

She Broke the Movie Sex Barrier

At the age of 18, Lamarr starred in Ecstasy, a 1933 German film that caused a scandal because of its sex scenes and nudity. In fact, the movie was the first to show an onscreen (simulated) orgasm—and a female one at that. (In her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, Lamarr said her coital reactions were created by the director pricking her butt with a safety pin.) More importantly, though, Lamarr portrayed a character that is still rarely seen in movies today: the sexually liberated woman who wasn’t ashamed of her physical desires.

Although the film wouldn’t be seen in the United States until 1940, Ecstasy was the movie that got Lamarr’s foot in the Hollywood door. By the late 1930s, she became an MGM contract player, negotiating a weekly salary worth four times more than the studio’s opening offer.

She Fought US Enemies Without Firing a Shot

Like many Hollywood celebs during World War II, Lamar used her star power to help the war effort by encouraging the sale of war bonds. But that wasn’t enough for the Austrian native, whose desire to stop the Nazis and her own boredom with acting pushed her to pursue one of her great passions: science.

Thanks to a previous marriage to a domineering munitions dealer, Lamarr knew a thing or two about weapons, particularly how simple it was to jam radio-controlled torpedoes. She worked with her neighbor, musical composer and fellow polymath George Antheil, to create a frequency-hopping system for the underwater missiles that would counteract jamming attempts.

Although the unlikely duo received a patent for their invention in 1942, the US military didn’t adopt the system until 20 years later after the patent expired. Nowadays, Lamarr and Antheil’s frequency-hopping system is used in GPS, Bluetooth, and other devices.

She Wasn’t a One-Invention Wonder

Lamarr’s use of science as a creative outlet didn’t stop with trying to build a better torpedo. She also tried to develop a better facial tissue box, as well as a better traffic signal, according to Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World by Richard Rhodes.

But those inventions, along with an instant carbonated beverage tablet and improvements to the Concorde supersonic airplane, never took off.

She Sued Mel Brooks Over Her Name

By the end of the 1960s, Lamarr was removing herself more and more from the media spotlight as acting jobs dwindled. This increased desire for privacy led to a $10 million lawsuit in 1974 that Lamarr filed against Mel Brooks. The actress objected to her name being used without her permission as a running gag in Brooks’ movie Blazing Saddles.

In that film, Harvey Korman plays a character named Hedley Lamarr, but other characters constantly call him “Hedy,” a mistake that is then continually corrected.

Brooks even zings the idea of legal action in the film, delivering the line: “What the hell are you worried about? This is 1874. You’ll be able to sue her.”

The suit was eventually settled out of court for much less than $10 million.