Los Angeles - Arab Today
Zsa Zsa Gabor, the Hungarian-born Hollywood siren perhaps better known for her prodigious love life than her movie credits, died Sunday after suffering a heart attack, her husband said. She was 99.
An emotional Frederic von Anhalt told AFP that Gabor had passed away at home surrounded by friends and family.
“Everybody was there. She didn’t die alone,” he told AFP by telephone, choking back sobs.
The pair married in 1986, making it her longest marriage.
Gabor, who in her heyday embodied the film industry’s platinum blonde ideal, was a voluptuous former beauty queen with a penchant for lame gowns that accentuated her hourglass figure. Her resume includes a long list of film roles in such hit movies as “Moulin Rouge,” “Lili” and “Arrivederci Baby!”
But the actress was at least as famous for her conquests off the screen as her triumphs on the silver screen. Like her famous great-granddaughter by marriage Paris Hilton, Gabor was among the first celebrities to be famous for her celebrity.
Her thick Hungarian accent was much parodied — especially her penchant for calling everyone she met “darling” — or “dahlink” as she pronounced it.
It became her unique signature.
“I call everyone ‘dahlink’ because I can’t remember their names,” the socialite once said. During nine marriages and a prodigious number of affairs that made her a fixture in America’s gossip magazines, she had just one child — a daughter Francesca, fathered by hotel magnate Conrad Hilton.
She wrote in her 1993 autobiography “One Lifetime is Not Enough” that her first love was Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.
“For the rest of my life, I would search for another ... to eclipse him,” Gabor wrote.
Gabor was known to be picky, however, spurning the advances of John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley, John Huston and Henry Fonda, she wrote in her autobiography.
Source: Arab News