Zsa Zsa Gabor, famed for her social life and her one-liners as much as for her acting career, has died. She was 99. After years of ill health, she finally succumbed to a heart attack.
Born Sári Gábor in Hungary on February 6, 1917, she had a career on the stage and was crowned Miss Hungary by the time she was 19. She moved to Hollywood to pursue stardom at 21, and made her film debut in 1952, in Mervyn Leroy's romantic musical comedy Lovely To Look At. Not for the last time, she played an exotic beauty named "Zsa Zsa".
She went on to parts in John Huston's Moulin Rouge and Orson Welles' Touch Of Evil, but while Huston insisted she was a "creditable" actress, arguably her biggest starring role was in the camp, cult curio Queen Of Outer Space in 1958, playing a sexpot despot from the planet Venus.
Her personal life soon eclipsed her screen work. She was married nine times, including to the famous hotelier Conrad Hilton in 1942, and to her Death Of A Scoundrel co-star George Sanders in 1949. Glamorous, feisty and funny on the celebrity circuit, she said her morals wouldn't allow her to sleep with a man unless they were married... and that when she'd had enough of them she got rid of them again, generally keeping the diamonds and the houses ("I am a marvellous housekeeper: every time I leave a man I keep his house"). Her final marriage was to Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt in 1986, making her officially Princess von Anhalt, Duchess of Saxony.
In later life she still made sporadic screen appearances, often playing on her own image, as in The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell Of Fear in which she's seen in the opening credits slapping a policeman: a reference to a notorious real-life incident for which she spent three days in jail. Her final sighting on the big screen was in A Very Brady Sequel in 1996, and, barring chat show appearances and a This Is Your Life, her final role on television was in Tatooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills in 1995.