Facts about Zsa Gabor

Zsa Zsa Gabor died at 99 years old
Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
Best known as: The much-married celebrity sister of Eva Gabor

     

     

Zsa Zsa Gabor Biography

Name at birth: Sari Gabor

At first a Hungarian model and actress, Zsa Zsa Gabor became more famous as a whimsical old-school celebrity sex symbol. At her death, Variety said her “60-year career of playing herself helped paved the way for today’s celebrity-obsessed culture.”

Zsa Zsa Gabor was named Miss Hungary of 1936, appeared on stage in Vienna, and made her way to America in 1946 just after the end of World War II. She married American William Rankin almost immediately, and divorced him in 1947, in what became a familiar pattern; she spent much of her long TV career joking about her man-hungry ways and her love of jewelry and furs. She married nine times in all, marrying her final husband, Frederic Prinz von Anhalt, in 1986, when he was 38 and she was 69. (Their marriage lasted until her death 30 years later.)

Zsa Zsa Gabor was a sometime actress and Hollywood celebrity in the 1950s and 1960s, when her film credits included the campy Queen of Outer Space (1958), Moulin Rouge (the 1951 version, not Nicole Kidman‘s 2001 version), and a small role as a nightclub manager in the Orson Welles classic Touch of Evil (1959). She was one of three sisters who became known in show business; Magda Gabor was a socialite and occasional actress, while Eva Gabor played the scatterbrained wife in the 1960s TV series Green Acres.

After years of declining fame, Zsa Zsa Gabor Gabor gained fresh notoriety in 1989 after she slapped a Beverly Hills policeman who pulled her over for a traffic violation. Another traffic accident, in 2002, left her temporarily in a coma, and she was partially paralyzed and in poor health from then until her death in 2016. In 2010 she had a hip replacement after falling out of her bed, reportedly while watching the game show Jeopardy! 

Extra credit

Zsa Zsa Gabor’s true year of birth is, not surprisingly, a matter of some confusion; most sources agree on 1917, but others list 1918 or 1923…Zsa Zsa Gabor played the villainess Minerva in the final episode of the 1960s TV series Batman… Zsa Zsa Gabor is the mother of actress Francesca Hilton, her daughter with her ex-husband Conrad Hilton… The name Frederic Prinz von Anhalt means “Frederic, prince of Anhalt,” but he is not actually a prince. At age 37 he paid to be adopted by Princess Marie-Auguste of Anhalt; while the transaction did not make him a prince, he took Prinz von Anhalt as his legal surname… Prinz von Anhalt made waves in 2007 when, after the death of Anna Nicole Smith, he claimed he was the father of Smith’s infant daughter Dannie Lynn. Von Anhalt said he and Smith had carried on a multi-year affair during his marriage to Zsa Zsa Gabor.


     

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