skip to main content

Hollywood legend, 'Queen of Quips' Zsa Zsa Gabor dies

Updated / Monday, 19 Dec 2016 13:39
Zsa Zsa Gabor in 1966 - Never lost for words
Zsa Zsa Gabor in 1966 - Never lost for words

Zsa Zsa Gabor, the legendary Hollywood star whose private life and rapier wit made her a mainstay of celebrity culture through the decades, has died. She was 99.

Gabor suffered a heart attack at her home in Bel Air, California. It is reported she had been on life support for five years as dementia took its toll. She would have turned 100 in February.

We need your consent to load this Facebook contentWe use Facebook to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences

Born Sari Gabor in Budapest - then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - former Miss Hungary Gabor began her career on the stage after being discovered by tenor Richard Tauber.

In a photo taken in 1954

Her screen credits included such iconic films as Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, the original Moulin Rouge and dozens of TV series, often playing herself.

Indeed, Gabor's most iconic role was the persona she cultivated in the media - the smart-answer socialite with an uncanny knack for quips about her eight marriages - and one annulment.

Once asked how many husbands she had had, Gabor replied: "You mean other than my own?" and in a lifetime filled with classics, some of Gabor's gems included:

I am a marvellous housekeeper: Every time I leave a man I keep his house";

A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he's finished" 

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

Along with her two sisters, Eva and Magda, Gabor became a fixture on Hollywood's social circuit. By the 1970s she began to reject smaller roles, saying: "I may be a character but I do not want to be a character actress."

In London in 1965

She eventually ended up in low-budget films with such titles as Queen of Outer Space and Picture Mommy Dead.

Greater success came with nightclub and TV appearances where she disclosed she called everyone "dah-ling" because she could not remember names well.

Her infamous 1989 traffic stop encounter with a Beverly Hills police officer, whom she slapped in the face, became the subject of a 1991 documentary, The People vs Zsa Zsa Gabor. She was convicted of slapping a police officer, driving without a licence and possessing an open container of alcohol in her Rolls-Royce but gamely sent up the case in The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear.

Gabor's health had declined rapidly since the turn of the century: a 2002 car crash confined her to a wheelchair; she suffered a stroke in 2005 and broke her hip in 2010. It is reported that her right leg was also amputated above the knee.

Pre-deceased by her daughter Francesca Hilton and sisters Eva and Magda, Gabor is survived by her husband, Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, whom she married in 1986.

People have paid tribute on social media:

More stories on

Read Next