Zsa Zsa Gabor, the Hungarian actress whose self-parodying glamour and revolving-door marriages to millionaires put a luster of American celebrity on a long but only modestly successful career in movies and television, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 99.
The cause was heart failure, her longtime publicist Edward Lozzi said.
Married at least eight times, calling everyone “Dahlink,” flaunting a diamonds-and-furs lifestyle and abetted by gossip columnists and tabloid headline writers, Ms. Gabor played the coifed platinum femme fatale in plunging necklines in dozens of film and television roles, many of them cameos as herself. Her career, which began with the title Miss Hungary in 1936, was still going strong in the 1990s, outlasting those of her sisters, Eva and Magda, celebrities in their own right. She was the last surviving Gabor sister.
“A girl must marry for love, and keep on marrying until she finds it,” Ms. Gabor once said. Her husbands included a Turkish diplomat, the hotel heir Conrad Hilton, the actor George Sanders, an industrialist, an oil magnate, a toy designer, a divorce lawyer and a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony. Another marriage that nobody counted — a case of bigamy at sea with a has-been Mexican actor — lasted only a day and was annulled.
Zsa Zsa Gabor — the woman who probably inspired the term "famous for being famous" — died on Sunday, according to multiple media outlets. She was 99 years old, just two months shy of her 100th birthday.
NPR has not independently confirmed the reports.
Buxom and blond, vampy and campy, the Hungarian-born screen siren mainly contributed to cultural touchstones such as The Love Boat, The Naked Gun 2 1/2 and Hollywood Squares — where she answered (or, more accurately, couldn't answer) questions about Cheez Whiz.
Zsa Zsa Gabor in 1954.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
But it would be a grave mistake to trivialize Gabor's achievements.
"She is one of the most important figures of the late 20th century in terms of thinking about celebrity, thinking about women," says Kirsten Pullen, a professor at Texas A&M University.
