Zsa Zsa Gabor was one of the most photographed women of the 20th century, a glamorous Hungarian-born celebrity known for her thick accent, her sharp wit, and her nine marriages. But behind the fur coats, the diamonds, and the quotable one-liners was a life far more complicated, and far more painful, than any headline ever captured. Born Sári Gabor on February 6, 1917, in Budapest, Hungary, she was the daughter of Vilmos Gabor and Jolie Tilleman, a prosperous Jewish family. Her mother, Jolie, was the driving force behind the Gabor sisters, enrolling young Sári in singing and acting lessons and pushing her toward pageants.
At 15, Zsa Zsa entered the Miss Hungary beauty pageant, though records on whether she won or placed are tangled and vary depending on who was telling the story. The family’s urgency about visibility and marrying well had a darker context. With nationalist movements rising across Europe, the future for Jewish families like the Gabors was uncertain. Jolie understood that the world her daughters were born into might not hold, and that the best insurance was a life built elsewhere.
In her late teens, Zsa Zsa went to Vienna to study at the Reinhardt Seminar, a prestigious theatrical school. It was there that she encountered Burhan Asaf Belge, a Turkish diplomat and intellectual considerably older than her. They married in 1937 in Ankara, when Zsa Zsa was around 20. She spent several years in Turkey moving through diplomatic circles, but by 1941 the marriage was over.
By 1941, Zsa Zsa had made her way to the United States, settling first in New York. In 1942, at a dinner party in New York, she met Conrad Hilton, the hotel magnate who was 55 while she was 25. They married on April 10, 1942, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The relationship was complicated from the start by two profoundly different temperaments.
Conrad was reserved, devoutly Catholic, and serious about his business empire. Zsa Zsa was vivacious, theatrical, and accustomed to being the center of attention. They had one child together, a daughter named Francesca Hilton, born March 10, 1947. The marriage ended in divorce that same year.
Francesca would spend portions of her adult life in difficult financial circumstances, engaged in protracted legal disputes over her father’s estate, and was quietly estranged from much of her family for long stretches. She passed away in January 2015 at age 67, before her mother. The next man in Zsa Zsa’s life was, by most accounts, the most consequential of all. George Sanders was a British actor born in St.
Petersburg, Russia in 1906, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1950 for All About Eve. He was witty to the point of cruelty, self-aware to the point of nihilism, and emotionally withholding in ways that could be cutting. Zsa Zsa and Sanders married on April 2, 1949, in Las Vegas. She was 32, he was 43.
Their arguments were reportedly spectacular, loud, and occasionally conducted in public. The marriage lasted until 1954, ending in divorce after five years. Four years later, in 1958, Sanders married Zsa Zsa’s own sister, Magda. That marriage lasted only months before ending in annulment, sending shockwaves through the family.
In April 1972, George Sanders checked into a hotel room in Castelldefels, near Barcelona, Spain, at age 65. He left a handwritten note expressing that he found life unbearable and was too bored to continue, and took a large quantity of barbiturates. He passed away on April 25, 1972. When the news reached Zsa Zsa, she was deeply shaken.
In interviews in the decades that followed, she described him openly as the great love of her life and said the grief of losing him never entirely left her. The marriages that followed in the late 1950s and 1960s were shorter and less fully documented. Her fourth marriage was to Herbert L. Hutner, a New York investment banker, in November 1964.
It lasted until 1966. In 1966, she married Edmond de Szigethy, a businessman about whom little is recorded, and the union lasted approximately one year. Her sixth marriage, to Joshua S. Cosden Jr.
, an oil heir from a prominent Texas family, was also brief. This succession of short marriages pointed not toward frivolity but toward something more like exhaustion. She was in her late 40s and early 50s during these years, aging in a Hollywood culture that had very little tenderness for women past a certain point. Her seventh marriage, in 1975, was to Jack Ryan, a Harvard-educated engineer who had worked as a weapons systems designer at the Raytheon Corporation, contributing to the Hawk and Sparrow missile systems.
In one of the most improbable pivots in 20th-century design history, he left defense work and joined Mattel, where he played a central role in developing the Barbie doll, which launched in 1959. He held over a thousand patents. The marriage to Zsa Zsa lasted barely a year, ending in 1976. Zsa Zsa then married Michael O’Hara, a lawyer who had served as her attorney, in August 1976.
The union lasted until 1982, making it one of her longer relationships. During this era, she became a regular on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, appearing dozens of times over the decades, beloved for her wit and her refusal to be anything other than herself. Her ninth and final marriage was to Frederic Prince von Anhalt, born Hans Robert Lichtenberg in 1943 in Germany. He acquired his title through legal adoption in 1980 by Marie Auguste, Princess of Anhalt.
They married on August 14, 1986, in Los Angeles. She was 69, he was 43. Critics questioned whether he was a genuine life partner or a man who understood the value of attaching himself to one of the most recognizable names in the world. In June 1989, while driving in Beverly Hills, Zsa Zsa was pulled over by a motorcycle officer named Paul Kramer.
She was accused of striking the officer during the stop. At trial, she was combative on the stand and disputed the officer’s account. She was found guilty of battery against a police officer, of having an open container of alcohol in her vehicle, and of driving with an expired license. The judge sentenced her to three days in jail, 120 hours of community service, and a fine.
Reports suggested other inmates sought her autograph while she was inside. In 2002, a car accident in which another driver ran a red light left her with lasting injuries affecting her mobility. In 2010, she suffered a severe stroke at age 93 that left her largely bedridden. In 2011, her right leg was amputated due to circulation complications.
Frederic continued to give press statements throughout this period, sparking ongoing disputes with Francesca Hilton, who expressed concerns about her mother’s welfare and frustration at being kept at a distance from her care. Zsa Zsa Gabor passed away on December 18, 2016, at her home in Bel Air. She was 99 years old. The cause was heart failure.
She had outlived two World Wars, the destruction of the Budapest she grew up in, nine marriages, and the death of her daughter. She was buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. She came from a country that no longer exists in the form she knew it, and built a life in a new world from essentially nothing. She was often difficult, sometimes reckless, and occasionally completely impossible.
But she was also brave in a way that gets routinely overlooked, brave enough to keep beginning again over and over in a world that had very little patience for women who refused to disappear quietly.