Last Gabor sister, Zsa Zsa, dies at 99

Quotes, not roles, built actress’s fame

In an Aug. 15, 1986 file photo, actress Zsa Zsa Gabor is shown Los Angeles.
In an Aug. 15, 1986 file photo, actress Zsa Zsa Gabor is shown Los Angeles.

Zsa Zsa Gabor, the jet-setting Hungarian actress who made a career out of multiple marriages, conspicuous wealth and jaded wisdom about the glamorous life, has died. She was 99.

The middle Gabor sister died Sunday of a heart attack at her Los Angeles home, husband Frederic von Anhalt told The Associated Press.

"We tried everything, but her heart just stopped and that was it," he said. "Even the ambulance tried very hard to get her back, but there was no way."

Gabor had been hospitalized repeatedly since she broke her right hip in July 2010 after a fall at her Bel-Air home. She already had to use a wheelchair after being partly paralyzed in a 2002 car accident and suffering a stroke in 2005. Most of her right leg was amputated in January 2011 because of gangrene, and the left leg was also threatened.

Gabor rose from beauty queen to millionaire's wife to television personality to film actress to public character. She never had a hit such as her sister Eva's Green Acres, but she was a long-running hit just for being Zsa Zsa, endlessly quotable:

• "Getting divorced just because you don't love a man is almost as silly as getting married just because you do."

• "I'm a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house."

• "I never hated a man enough to give him back his diamonds."

• "I want a man who's kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?"

• "Diamonds are a girl's best friend, and dogs are a man's best friend. Now you know which sex has more sense."

Her secret, in part, was being in on the joke, once saying about a 1956 TV role: "I play a fabulously rich woman who has just bought her fifth husband; she is very unhappy. I won't tell you who it's supposed to be."

For a time, she was most famous for slapping Paul Kramer, a police officer, on a Beverly Hills street after he pulled over her Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible for a traffic violation in June 1989. She was convicted of misdemeanor battery on a police officer, driving without a driver's license and having an open container of alcohol in the car. She served three days in jail, performed community service at a women's shelter and paid $13,000 in fines and restitution.

Sari Gabor -- Zsa Zsa is a family nickname -- was born in Budapest in 1917, according to a finishing school yearbook kept by a former classmate. Various references over the years have given other birth dates; Gabor usually avoided the subject.

Gabor, sisters Eva and Magda, and their mother, Jolie, emigrated to America around World War II. Zsa Zsa Gabor gained notice in 1942 when she married Conrad Hilton, the great-grandfather of Paris Hilton. It was Gabor's second of nine marriages.

By the following decade, all the Gabors were celebrities. The other three died in the 1990s.

Among Gabor's more prominent credits: John Huston's Toulouse-Lautrec biopic, Moulin Rouge, in 1952, and Orson Welles' classic Touch of Evil in 1958. More recently, she appeared in the Nightmare on Elm Street series and in the Naked Gun spoofs.

When asked her assessment of other socialites, Gabor usually said she found them lacking.

"I think she's rather silly," she told Vanity Fair of Paris Hilton. "She does too many things for publicity."

Information for this article was contributed by Hillel Italie, Sandy Cohen and Polly Anderson of The Associated Press; and by Adam Bernstein of The Washington Post.

A Section on 12/19/2016

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