Zsa Zsa Gabor Dead: Hollywood Legend Dies Aged 99
Hollywood icon Zsa Zsa Gabor has died at the age of 99 after suffering a heart attack, her husband, Frederic von Anhalt, has confirmed.
He told the AFP his wife had passed away at home, surrounded by her friends and family.
“Everybody was there. She didn’t die alone,” Frederic von Anhalt said.
Born in Hungary, Zsa Zsa Gabor emigrated to the United States during World War Two and made her Hollywood debut in 1952. She was married nine times.
The actress appeared in more than 70 movies, but was more famous for her celebrity lifestyle.
Zsa Zsa Gabor, born Sari Gabor on February 6, 1917, first married at the age of 20 and for the last (and longest) time when she was nearly 70 to the man who outlived her.
Image source Wikimedia
By her own reckoning the actress was only married eight-and-a-half times – she said she didn’t really count a Spanish duke in 1982.
Though she had initially wanted to be a vet, her mother had other ideas – and her beauty soon saw show business beckon.
Zsa Zsa Gabor was crowned Miss Hungary in 1936, but was later disqualified for lying about her age to enter the pageant.
Her credits include a long list of roles in such hit movies as Moulin Rouge (1952), Lili (1953) and Queen of Outer Space (1958). More recently, Zsa Zsa Gabor featured in the Nightmare on Elm Street series and in the Naked Gun spoofs.
In her heyday, Zsa Zsa Gabor embodied Hollywood’s platinum blonde ideal and was famous for wearing lame gowns.
Her only child was Constance Francesca Hilton, her daughter with hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, who was born in 1947.
Zsa Zsa Gabor was arguably among the first women to be “famous for being famous” – a quality often attributed to her famous great-granddaughter by marriage, Paris Hilton.
She was affectionately mocked for her strong Hungarian accent, in which she called everybody “darling” – or “dahlink” as she pronounced it.
“I call everyone <<dahlink>> because I can’t remember their names,” she once said.
Her mother had reportedly told her: “You don’t have to marry every man you sleep with.”
Zsa Zsa Gabor said she did it because she “never stopped being a Catholic at heart”.
In her 1993 autobiography “One Lifetime is Not Enough”, Zsa Zsa Gabor claimed to have lost her virginity to Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, when she was 15.
The tell-all account also referred to romances with screen legends Sean Connery and Frank Sinatra, quite apart from her roster of husbands. She claimed to have turned down John F. Kennedy and Elvis Presley.
Though she spent her life delivering others’ lines, Zsa Zsa Gabor could turn a memorable phrase herself.
Pondering her good relations with her many ex-husbands, she said: “I never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back.”
She also commented: “I am a marvelous housekeeper: Every time I leave a man I keep his house.”
Zsa Zsa Gabor was plagued by ill-health in her later years, and was left wheelchair-bound after a 2002 car accident in Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles.
She survived strokes in 2005 and 2007, and was left heavily dependent on her husband.
In 2011, Zsa Zsa Gabor suffered an infection that saw her right leg amputated above the knee to save her life.