Zsa Zsa Gabor, the Hungarian actress whose self-parodying glamour and revolving-door marriages to millionaires put a lustre of American celebrity on a long but only modestly successful career in movies and television, was believed to be aged 99 when she died.
Married nine times (including an annulled marriage), calling everyone “Dahlink,” flaunting a diamonds-and-furs lifestyle and abetted by gossip columnists and tabloid headline writers, Gabor played the coiffed platinum femme fatale in plunging necklines in dozens of film and television roles, many of them cameos as herself. Her career, which began with the title Miss Hungary in 1936, was still going strong in the 1990s, outlasting those of her sisters, Eva and Magda, celebrities in their own right. She was the last surviving Gabor sister.
“A girl must marry for love, and keep on marrying until she finds it,” Gabor once said. Her husbands included a Turkish diplomat, the hotel heir Conrad Hilton, the actor George Sanders, an industrialist, an oil magnate, a toy designer, a divorce lawyer and a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony. The ninth marriage – a case of bigamy at sea with a has-been Mexican actor – lasted only a day and was annulled.
In 1989 she was arrested for slapping a police officer who had pulled her over for a traffic violation and found that her licence had expired and that she had an open vodka bottle in her car, a Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible. Breezing into court, she took the stand and, by turns haughty, coquettish, weepy and coarse, spoke of Gestapo tactics in Beverly Hills. The judge gave her 72 hours in jail.
“You just cannot drive a Rolls-Royce in Beverly Hills any more, because they have it in for you,” she said after things had blown over.
Gabor appeared in more than 60 television movies and feature films, mostly American-made, although some were Italian, French, German and Australian. Critics said her best roles were early in her career, in Moulin Rouge (1952) and Lili (1953). She also appeared as a nightclub manager in Orson Welles's 1958 classic Touch of Evil and, the same year, as a sexy alien in Queen of Outer Space.
From the 1950s into the 1990s she was also on scores of television programmes: talk shows, game shows, comedy specials, Westerns, episodic dramas. On the 1960s series Batman she played the gold-digging Minerva, whose mineral spa fleeced swells by extracting secrets from their brains. "A real vicked voman," she described the character in her Hungarian accent.
Exploiting her naughty celebrity, Gabor, with the help of collaborators and ghost writers, published four books: Zsa Zsa Gabor: My Story (1960), Zsa Zsa's Complete Guide to Men¨ (1969), How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, How to Get Rid of a Man (1970) and One Lifetime Is Not Enough (1991).
In addition to her steady appearances in movies and on television, Gabor operated a mail-order cosmetics company. She once offered $1 million to anyone who could prove she had had a face-lift.
In 1974 she bought a villa in Bel Air built by Howard Hughes and formerly owned by Elvis Presley. Her multitiered clothes closet – 30ft long, 12ft deep and 14ft high – contained 5,000 garments that, except for favoured gowns, were given to charities and replaced with a new wardrobe from time to time, according to her official fan site, zsazsagabor.org.
In early 2009 Gabor discovered that she had joined a long list of celebrities who were victimised by Bernard L Madoff, the financial swindler whose worldwide Ponzi scheme cost investors tens of billions. Her lawyer Chris Fields said she lost at least $7 million and possibly as much as $10 million.
Gabor had been in and out of hospitals for years. She suffered head and other injuries and was hospitalised for a month in 2002 after a car driven by her hairdresser struck a utility pole in West Hollywood. It left her in a wheelchair, and she retreated from the spotlight. She suffered a stroke in 2005 and had surgery for a blocked carotid artery. In 2007, she again underwent surgery to treat a leg infection and after-effects of the stroke.
In July 2010, she underwent hip-replacement surgery after a fall at her home in which she also suffered a concussion. Released from the hospital in August, she was readmitted two days later for treatment of unspecified complications. In January 2011, her right leg was surgically amputated above the knee after an infection proved resistant to antibiotics. Doctors said the operation was necessary to save her life.
Two months later, shock over the death of her friend Elizabeth Taylor sent her to the hospital with high blood pressure, and Gabor’s publicist, John Blanchette, quoted her as saying she feared she was next. In November 2011, she was taken to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center for emergency surgery after blood began flowing through a feeding tube inserted in her stomach.
Born Sari Gabor in Budapest in 1917, 1918 or 1919 – she always gave a birth date of February 6th or 7th, but not the year, though most sources suggest it was 1917 – Gabor grew up in relative prosperity, the second of three daughters of Vilmos and Jolie Gabor. Raised for stardom, the sisters attended private schools and were chauffeured to acting, dancing, music and fencing classes.
On the eve of the second World War, Gabor, her mother and her sisters, Magda and Eva, emigrated to the US, and by the 1950s the Gabor sisters had become as well known for their love lives as for their careers.
Magda, who acted on radio briefly and helped her mother operate a chain of jewellery boutiques, died in 1997, as did her mother. Eva, who was best known for her role on television's Green Acres in the 1960s – and whom the public sometimes confused with Zsa Zsa – died in 1995.
Zsa Zsa, who divorced seven of her eight husbands, was first married to Burhan Belge, a Turkish diplomat in Budapest, from 1937 to 1941. Her second marriage, to Hilton, lasted from 1942 to 1947. Their daughter, Francesca Hilton, an actror, was Gabor’s only child. She died in 2015.
Her other marriages were to Sanders (1949-54), who later married Magda Gabor; the investor-industrialist Herbert L Hutner (1962-66); the oil magnate Joshua S Cosden Jr (1966-67); Jack Ryan, an inventor and toy designer who helped create the Barbie doll (1975-76); Michael O’Hara, a lawyer (1976-82); and Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, whom she married in 1986.
Prinz von Anhalt, often described in the news media as a prince or the Duke of Saxony, was born Hans Robert Lichtenberg, the son of a police officer in Germany. He changed his name to include what sounded like a title after Princess Marie Auguste of Anhalt, the Duchess of Saxony, adopted him in 1980 as an adult. The adoption, widely reported to have been a business transaction, conferred only an illusion of nobility, reinforced by the name change.
Some biographies of Gabor also mention a 1983 marriage to Felipe de Alba, a lawyer who appeared in films in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, but Gabor said it lasted only a day. The ceremony was performed by a ship’s captain at sea but was probably illegal because the ship was not in international waters, and Gabor was technically not yet divorced from O’Hara. It was later annulled, just to make sure.
There were also notorious affairs with Porfirio Rubirosa, the Dominican playboy, and with Rafael Trujillo Jr, the son of the Dominican dictator.
Gabor’s many public appearances included a 1987 address to the American Bar Association convention in San Francisco, where she spoke to the family law section at a standing-room-only luncheon. “We’ve had enough of the routine speakers,” the chairman said, introducing Gabor as “an optimist who still believes in marriage.”
Telling her tales of marital joys and woes, Gabor confided, “I have learned that not diamonds but divorce lawyers are a girl’s best friend.” Then, inviting questions, the chairman said, “Let’s keep it on direct, not on cross.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“That means they’ve got to be nice to you.”
– New York Times syndicate