7 Fun Facts About Zsa Zsa Gabor
For a long time all I knew about the Hungarian actress Zsa Zsa Gabor — who was born on Feb. 6, 1917, and would be 108 today — was that she pronounced her name very similarly to mine (zha-zha, like a French J). Over the years, I have often referenced the actress in order to explain how to pronounce my name (Zhanna). However, this reference now mostly results in blank stares, especially among my fellow millennials.
If only to keep her name in the public lexicon, for my own selfish reasons, I bring you a list of super interesting facts about Hollywood icon Zsa Zsa Gabor.
1 Zsa Zsa Gabor had NINE husbands. That is more than Elizabeth Taylor!
Unlike Taylor, who remarried a divorced husband at one point (Richard Burton), all nine of Gabor’s husbands were different men. And speaking of Elizabeth Taylor, they even both married into the same family, though at separate times! Here are some highlights of some of the most notable husbands Gabor had:
Husband #2: From 1942 to 1947, Gabor was married to the Hilton hotel founder Conrad Hilton, who was 30 years her senior. Making her the former step-great-grandmother of Paris Hilton? Am I counting that correctly? I don’t know, but that is an odd connection for sure. Fun Fact: Hilton’s son Conrad Jr. was also married to Elizabeth Taylor for about a year, in 1950. If Gabor had stayed with her second husband a bit longer, she could have been her… stepmom?
Everette Collection
Husband #3: The Russian-born British actor George Sanders, who, among many other roles, played theater critic Addison DeWalt in All About Eve and later voiced Shere Khan in The Jungle Book, was married to Gabor from 1949-1954. Interestingly, Sanders (pictured above) was also married to her sister, Magda Gabor, for just one year.
Husband #6: Gabor was briefly (from 1975-75) married to Jack Ryan (pictured below) — the self-proclaimed inventor of the Barbie doll, not the beloved fictional spy from the imagination of Tom Clancy. Ryan was a notorious oddball who was well-known for hosting orgies in the basement dungeon of the house he renovated to look like a castle. (Read more about him here.) So not a huge surprise that the marriage didn’t last.
Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Husband #7: In 1976, three days after divorcing Jack Ryan, Gabor married her divorce attorney, Michael O’Hara. (I suppose she was seeing him enough by then to spark a romance!) They divorced in 1983, which I’m sure was no picnic. Although she was known for saying, “I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house.” Did she keep his house, I wonder?
2 Zsa Zsa is not her real name
Zsa Zsa Gabor was born in Budapest, Hungary, as Sári Gábor. Her parents, who were both Jewish, fled Hungary after the Nazi occupation in 1944, and she left just before them in 1941. Gabor was nicknamed Zsa Zsa because, as a little girl, she couldn’t pronounce her own name.
3 She was crowned Miss Hungary of 1936
She was later disqualified because she apparently she had lied about her age, saying she was older than she was at the time.
4 Her sister was the popular actress Eva Gabor
Courtesy of Everett
Eva is most well-known for playing Lisa Douglas on the TV series Green Acres (she also voiced the Duchess on the classic Disney animated film The Aristocats). She, too, had a number of husbands, but just five to her sister’s nine. She died in 1995.
5 She called everyone “dah-ling” because she had trouble remembering names
That’s one way to do it!
6 She had one daughter
The Gabor family in 1958: (L-R) Zsa Zsa’s sister, Magda, mother Jolie, and actress sister Eva. Seated, (L-R); Zsa Zsa Gabor, her father, Vilmos and her daughter Constance Francesca Hilton. Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Francesa Hilton, who Gabor had with Conrad Hilton, was also an actress and died shortly before her mother in 2015. Zsa Zsa was suffering from severe dementia at the time, and no one told her about it. Gabor died at age 99 on Dec. 18, 2016, just two months before she would have turned 100!
7 She was an author
Gabor authored three books: How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, How to Get Rid of a Man, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s Complete Guide to Men, and One Lifetime Is Not Enough. These books appear to be out of print.
Remind
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