Celebrities, especially women, are mostly known for their looks. We talk about their dresses on red carpets, how much makeup they use, if they’ve had plastic surgery, how much their weight and many other things. We tend to forget that female celebrities are also people and are much more than what we see in a photograph.
These extraordinary women succeeded in the film industry but their impact is way much stronger outside of the cinema and their looks.
Audrey Hepburn
Audrey Hepburn has been mostly known for her acting career in movies like Roman Holiday (1953), Sabrina (1954), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), and many others. She’s also known as a fashion icon, recognized by her induction into the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame.
Nevertheless, an aspect of her life that is not talked about as much is her humanitarian career.
When she was a child, she received international aid from UNICEF after the German occupation of the Netherlands. Hepburn stated in several interviews that she was grateful for the organization so, in 1989, she was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador of UNICEF.
Since then, she toured different countries for UNICEF missions, some of them being in Ethiopia, Turkey, Venezuela, Ecuador, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Sudan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Somalia.
Hepburn stopped acting and dedicated the last years of her life to humanitarian aid. The last trip she did with UNICEF was in September 1992, four months before she passed from appendiceal cancer.
Emma Watson
Emma Watson rose to fame with her role of Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter film series and later appeared in different movies such as Beauty and the Beast (2017), and Little Women (2019). According to Forbes and Vanity Fair, she’s among the world’s highest-paid actresses and was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2015.
Something that is much less talked about is her work as a women’s rights activist.
Watson has been vocal about her work as a feminist, with her being appointed a United Nations Women Goodwill ambassador in 2014. Later she helped launched the UN Women campaign HeForShe, which looks to create solidarity among men for gender equality.
She was a founding member for Time’s UP UK in 2018 and in 2019 Watson was appointed to a G7 advisory body for women’s rights 2019, to consult with leaders on foreign policy.
She has also stated her support for transgender rights, following the controversy of J. K. Rowling’s remarks on gender identity, supported the Black Lives Matter movement, and supported the Palestine freedom case.
Watson is also an activist for environmental justice and climate change mitigation. It was reported in 2021 that she was part of a group of investors funding $12.5 million into FabricNano, a startup developing sustainable alternatives to petrochemical products. She has also lent her name to a clothing line for the sustainable brand People Tree, and in 2020 she joined the board of directors of Kering (a group that owns luxury brands such as Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, Gucci, Alexander MacQueen among others), to advocate for sustainable fashion.
Hedy Lemarr
Hedy Lamarr has been mostly known for her film career, starting with the controversial film Ecstasy (1933) in Czechoslovakia, and later rose to fame in Hollywood with Algiers (1938), Boom Town (1940), Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949) among others.
She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960, but most of her career Lamarr was typecasted as the archetype of a glamorous seductress of exotic origin because she was from Austria.
Nevertheless, she used her spare time on various hobbies and inventions, mostly because her father used to explain to her how various technologies functioned.
At the beginning of World War II, she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers.
This technology couldn’t be used until de 1960′s because of technological difficulties, but the technology developed by Lemarr and Antheil has been incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology, and something similar is being done with legacy (or old) versions of CDMA (a type of radio technology) and Wi-Fi.
Lemarr and Antheil’s work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie is mostly known for her roles in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), Maleficent (2014), Eternals (2021). Her image is very tied to the perception of her beauty and sex appeal to the public, with her generally being described as “the world’s most beautiful woman” by media outlets like Vogue, People, and Vanity Fair.
Her public perception hasn’t stopped her from doing what she loves and she has written and directed war dramas like In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011), Unbroken (2014), and First They Killed my Father (2017).
Jolie is also very involved in humanitarian efforts, supporting different causes, among those the conservation, education, and women’s rights. But her most noted work is her advocacy on behalf of refugees as a Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). She has undertaken more than a dozen field missions globally to refugee camps and war zones, visiting countries that include Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, and Sudan.
She has decided to dedicate herself to her humanitarian work, but a lot of her work in Hollywood has been influenced by her experiences. Currently, she’s using her voice to talk about refugees, so those that don’t come from Ukraine aren’t forgotten.
Megan Fox
Megan Fox rose to fame with her role of Mikaela Banes in Transformers (2007), and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), and ever since then her public perception has been based on her looks and sex appeal.
She has been featured in several magazines that describe her as the “hottest” and “most beautiful woman” throughout the years, like Maxim’s Hot 100 or when People named her one of the 2012′s and 2017′s Most Beautiful at Every Age.
But she’s also a woman with a lot of interest in history, with the Travel Channel making a documentary series called Legends of the Lost with Megan Fox in 2018.
While she doesn’t have a college education, she has said in several interviews that she is more than just her looks and knows way more than media outlets would make the public believe.
