Zsa Zsa Gabor, the Hungarian actress made glamorous American celebrity, died Sunday of a heart attack. She was 99.
Remembered in Hollywood and tabloids for her glamour and many husbands, Gabor was often in the limelight. She was in over 60 films, including television movies and foreign films, and is best remembered for her roles in the 1952 “Moulin Rouge” and 1953 “Lili,” reported the New York Times.
Gabor was married nine times, including to Paris Hilton’s grandfather, hotel owner Conrad Hilton, whom she had a child with. Her sisters, Magda and Eva, also actresses, had six and five marriages each, reported Reuters.
“I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house,” Gabor once said.“I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house,” Gabor once said. She was deemed “the most expensive courtesan since Madame de Pompadour.”
Sari Gabor, nicknamed Zsa Zsa by her family, was born to a wealthy Hungarian family in 1917 in Budapest. She was named Miss Hungary in the 1930s and shortly thereafter married her first husband, a Turkish diplomat, reported Reuters. In 1941, Gabor followed her sister to the the U.S. and began her long career of acting.
The actress made headlines once again in 1989 for slapping a police officer after she was pulled over for a traffic violation in her Rolls Royce.
“Her beautiful lips and mouth would be her worst enemy when and if she turned on the verbal machine gun,” wrote her publicist Edward Lozzi. “Most of her problems resulted from that beautiful mouth.”
Her wealth was a celebrity on its own. Gabor bought a house once owned by Elvis Presley with a 30-foot-long closet to contain her 5,000 garments, reported the New York Times. In 2009, she was also involved in the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme in 2009 and lost over $7 million dollars, according to her lawyer Chris Fields.
Gabor continued her acting career through the 1990s mostly on television and wrote four books in the latter decades of her career. Her health issues began in the early 2000s, when she was hospitalized in 2002 after a car accident and in 2005 after a stroke. Five years later, Gabor underwent hip-replacement surgery and had her right leg amputated above the knee in 2011 due to infection, reported the New York Times.
According to her publicist, Edward Lozzi, Gabor had chronic dementia and was “locked away in her mansion laying in a hospital bed being fed through tubes in her naval, not able to speak, see, write or hear. Nor knowing who she was or how famous she was.”
Gabor is survived by her husband Prinz von Anhalt. Her only child, daughter Francesca Hilton, died in 2015. Gabor would have turned 100 in February.
“Zsa Zsa and her daughter Francesca Hilton are together again. Always remembered,” said Lozzi in his statement.
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