Zsa Zsa Gabor Biography

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!