The marriages were a recurring feature of her biographical story that she herself recognized as complicated. She married six times. She was searching for something that the marriages did not provide, or that they provided briefly before the circumstances changed. Her later accounts of this period were simultaneously candid and evasive: she acknowledged the pattern without fully explaining it, and any explanation offered here would be speculation.
She left MGM in 1945 and established Mars Film Corporation, one of the first actress-owned production companies of the era. The venture gave her creative control that the studio system had not, but it also deprived her of the infrastructure — the publicity, the distribution networks, the production support — that had sustained her career. The Strange Woman (1946) and Dishonored Lady (1947) were made under this arrangement. Neither revived the momentum her earlier career had established.
## Samson and Delilah
The exception was 1949. Cecil B. DeMille, who was at this point in his career a director of spectacular Biblical epics with enormous budgets and enormous audiences, cast Lamarr as Delilah opposite Victor Mature’s Samson in a production that cost nearly three million dollars and returned more than eleven million at the box office. It was by far the most commercially successful film she ever made, and it was, as an artifact of its era, genuinely extraordinary: DeMille’s command of spectacle, Lamarr’s sustained physical presence over two hours of Technicolor, the score by Victor Young, the sets and costumes that would win Academy Awards.
She was thirty-four. She looked, on screen, ageless.