The actor, socialite and exercise guru has died at the age of 99. We look back over her life and career in clips

The second of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s nine husbands was Conrad Hilton, founder of the hotel chain. Although the couple divorced in 1946, Gabor’s legacy to the family arguably includes the career of Hilton’s great-granddaughter Paris: with her string of beauty pageants, minor movie roles, social hobnobbing and trading on reputation, Gabor was among the first to recognise and fully exploit the fact that profitable stardom need not be a function of conspicuous performing talent.

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Sari Gabor was born in Budapest, probably in 1918, to a soldier father and Jewish mother with American connections. After attending school in Switzerland, she made her debut on the Viennese stage at 19, singing in operetta. She would go on to pursue work in beauty pageants and in movies in the US; her sister Eva preceded her in moving to Hollywood. Early screen roles included parts in 1952 alongside Red Skelton in Lovely to Look At and Ginger Rogers in We’re Not Married!, a somewhat ironic title given Gabor’s later enthusiasm for matrimony. In this trailer for the latter, a group farce about marriages botched on a technicality, she can be glimpsed alongside Rogers, Marilyn Monroe and Eve Arden, drawling coquettishly (if not entirely clearly) about champagne.

Such parts quickly led to one of the leads in John Huston’s account of Toulouse-Lautrec and the Montmartre demimonde, Moulin Rouge. As the following clip shows, Gabor’s part as prima donna Jane Avril made the most of her experience on the stage, though Huston reportedly used long shots to divert attention away from her lip synching.

Full-blown stardom did not materialise, though there were more supporting roles in features and regular TV work throughout the 1950s, including, in 1958, a cameo in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil and parts in The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk and Queen of Outer Space, a sci-fi thriller about Venusian man-haters with a grudge against their own queen.

More bit parts and cameos continued on big and small screen throughout the 1960s, including a turn in the Batman series as a nefarious spa owner named Minerva. Gabor’s role in the last-ever episode could be considered part of the reason for the series’ terminal decline into irredeemable camp: beauty products have rarely been put to such dastardly use in the service of “glorious, glamorous, glittering power”!

Gabor was by now increasingly known as a celebrity in her own right, having appeared as herself on talk shows, gameshows and other programmes throughout the 1950s and 1960s. She continued this approach for many years, playing off her own image of the glamorous gold-digger on shows such as Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.

Her profile remained high, thanks to dozens of screen appearances in the 1970s and 1980s, on shows as varied as Knots Landing, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, in which she is slashed during a talk show appearance.

Gabor hit headlines again in 1990 when, aged 72, she was convicted of slapping a police officer in a traffic incident – a moment she used as fodder for appearances in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and The Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear, cementing her associations with glamour and entitlement.



Gabor developed her personal brand with a range of products, including engagement rings and a 1993 work-out video, It’s Simple Darling, in which she is assisted by “my two muscular friends Mike and François”.

The project attracted the attention of Clive James, who spoke to the star at a time when various legal wranglings restricted the number of subjects she could discuss.

In recent years Gabor endured a number of accidents and illnesses, and appeared less frequently in public or on screen. It seems fitting to end by looking back at a 1960 appearance on the gameshow What’s My Line?, in which Gabor, flirting with the camera looks lovely. She charms the audience, is ambiguous about her age and leaves the panellists understandably baffled as to just what it is she actually does …