Actress, socialite and serial wife

Born February 6, 1917;

Died: December 18, 2016

ZSA Zsa Gabor, who has died aged 99, was famous for being Zsa Zsa Gabor.

A former beauty queen and actress, she collected rich husbands the way some people might collect rare stamps.

Gabor set a Hollywood record of nine spouses in total, including actor George Sanders and hotelier Conrad Hilton. But she did not let the failure of so many relationships get her down and liked to look for the positives. “I am a marvellous housekeeper - every time I leave a man I keep his house,” she famously quipped.

By way of comparison Mickey Rooney had eight spouses and Liz Taylor seven, including Gabor’s stepson Conrad Hilton Jr, though Gabor slept with him first while married to his father.

In many ways, Gabor was the Paris Hilton of her day, albeit a wittier version. Everyone had heard of her and many would know she had been a film star in the distant past, but few would be able to name any of her films.

Her most popular film, according to Internet Movie Database statistics, was The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991), in which she had a cameo role. In fact she played herself in more feature films than any other actor or actress, according to the book Film Facts - eight films, which also included The Beverly Hillbillies in 1993.

She was born Sari Gabor, into a wealthy family in Budapest in 1917 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was still embroiled in the First World War. Her father was a cavalry officer, with a violent temper. Her elder sister Magda became a noted socialite - she also did some acting and was also married to George Sanders. The youngest sister Eva became a well-known actress in Hollywood too.

The girls were all glamorous and beautiful, they went to finishing school in Switzerland and figured in newspaper society columns. There is some doubt about the details of the widely reported story that Zsa Zsa Gabor was Miss Hungary. In his book Those Glamorous Gabors: Bombshells from Budapest (2013), Darwin Porter suggests she did “win” the contest in 1932, only to be disqualified as she was only 15.

She also made her stage debut as a teenager, singing and dancing in operetta in Vienna with Richard Tauber. She married for the first time at 20, to Burhan Belge, a Turkish politician and personal friend of Adolf Hitler.

Eva was the first of the sisters to head to the US. Zsa Zsa followed after the collapse of her first marriage. In 1942 she married Conrad Hilton, with whom she had her only child Constance Hilton. But the marriage was already seemingly on the rocks. She claimed her daughter was the result of Hilton raping her. She also claimed Frank Sinatra raped her and later accused her daughter of fraud.

Despite Hilton’s wealth from his international hotel chain, it seems this may not have been her most lucrative divorce settlement. “He gave me 5,000 Gideon Bibles,” she said. Forced to work to maintain her lavish lifestyle, Gabor began appearing in Hollywood movies in the early 1950s.

Her earliest films include John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952), in which she had one of the main roles alongside Jose Ferrer as Toulouse-Lautrec. She was beautiful, blonde and exotic and spoke with a distinctive European accent, which some mistook for sophistication and others mocked. Her catchphrase became the single word “dahlink”.

By that time she was married to George Saunders. They divorced in 1954 and he later married Magda.

Zsa Zsa Gabor’s acting career did not really go anywhere after Moulin Rogue. About the only award she ever won was a Golden Globe, not as Best Actress, but as Most Glamorous Actress.

But then it did not need to go anywhere. As she herself indicated, her marriages made her rich. There were two more in the 1960s, both to rich businessmen, and two more divorces, and by the early 1970s Gabor was living in Elvis Presley’s old house in Bel Air.

Between them the three Gabor sisters had 20 husbands (if you count Sanders twice) – Zsa Zsa was top with nine. Magda was second with six. Eva had only five. When asked how many husbands she had had, Zsa Zsa once replied: “You mean other than my own?”

She claimed to have had an affair with Richard Nixon. “Even in bed he insisted on being called Mr President, although Dick might have been more appropriate,” she said.

There were also relationships with numerous film stars, including reputedly Richard Burton and Sean Connery. She said she was turned on by his Scottish accent and that he gave her a nude sketch of himself, dating from the time he modelled for art students in Edinburgh.

Her eighth marriage to the Mexican playboy Count Felipe de Alba was annulled because of a legal technicality over the ending of her seventh marriage – basically it had not quite ended. Her final marriage in 1986 was to Prince Frederic von Anhalt, a German 26 years her junior.

She hit the headlines in 1989 when she was stopped by a policeman for a traffic offence and responded by slapping him, resulting in her arrest and brief incarceration. She wrote several books including Zsa Zsa’s Complete Guide to Men (1969) and One Lifetime is Not Enough (1991).

She was plagued by serious health problems in her eighties and nineties. She had at least two strokes, a hip replacement and leg amputated, though even in her nineties she was talking about having another child, using a surrogate mother. There were also reports of financial problems.

She is survived by von Anhalt and was pre-deceased by her daughter.

BRIAN PENDREIGH