Hollywood glamour queen Zsa Zsa Gabor, 99, died of a heart attack today. She was the original Kim Kardashian — known more for her real-life exploits than anything she ever accomplished in her acting career. Sister of Green Acres star Eva Gabor, the Hungarian actress personified the razzle-dazzle of the Beverly Hills socialite lifestyle. Here are some fascinating tidbits about her life.
She was the original celebutante
Gabor’s larger-than-life personality was more captivating than any character she could possibly create, so most of her 80 screen credits are for playing herself. In his autobiography, Merv Griffin wrote about Gabor, her mother and sisters, “All these years later, it’s hard to describe the phenomenon of the three glamorous Gabor girls and their ubiquitous mother. They burst onto the society pages and into the gossip columns so suddenly, and with such force, it was as if they’d been dropped out of the sky.”
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She had more marriages than Elizabeth Taylor
Gabor was married nine times, with seven divorces and one annulment. Her husbands were Turkish intellectual Burhan Asaf Belge, hotelier Conrad Hilton, actor George Sanders, investment banker Herbert Hutner, oil magnate Joshua S. Cosden Jr., toy designer Jack Ryan, actor Michael O’Hara, actor Felipe de Alba and socialite and psuedo-royal Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, to whom she was still married at the time of her death.
She could’ve been Paris Hilton’s great-grandma
Gabor’s second husband, Conrad Hilton, was the great-grandfather of realty TV star Paris Hilton and the father of Gabor’s only child. Constance Francesca Hilton was born in 1947, and according to Gabor’s 1991 autobiography One Lifetime Is Not Enough, was allegedly the result of her husband raping her. They divorced the same year.
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Her wild arrest captivated the nation
In a pre-TMZ era, it took a major incident to bring most celebrity news to the desk of anchors like Dan Rather — and Gabor really knew how to make a splash. In 1989, she was arrested during a traffic stop after slapping a police officer across the face. The trial was filled with many comedic moments, including Gabor being admonished for sketching the jurors (she was actually drawing her dogs) while someone else was testifying, and she was eventually convicted on three out of four charges. She refused to perform community service and instead served three days in jail.
She was involved in a hilarious celebrity feud
In 1984, Gabor appeared on Circus of the Stars with actress Elke Sommer. Word got back to Gabor that Sommer saw her getting on a horse and allegedly remarked, “Zsa Zsa has such a big behind that she could not even manage to get on the horse by herself.” They kept their catfight semi-private for a few years, until Gabor and her then-husband gave a scathing interview about Sommer to a German magazine, in which they said the actress was 68 but looked like a “balding 100-year-old grandmother” (she was actually 48), was broke and lived “in the worst section of Los Angeles” and had to sell hand-knit sweaters to support herself because her acting career had gone down the tubes. Sommer sued them for libel and won a $3.3 million judgment.
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