Zsa Zsa Gabor

Zsa Zsa Gabor (born 6 February 1917) is a Hungarian-born American socialite and actress who acted in supporting roles in movies, on Broadway, and occasionally on television.

She began her stage career in Vienna at age 15, and was crowned Miss Hungary in 1936. She emigrated to the United States in 1941 and became a sought-after actress with "European flair and style", with a personality that "exuded charm and grace". Her first movie role was as supporting actress in Lovely to Look At. She later acted in We're Not Married! and played one of her few leading roles in Moulin Rouge (1952), directed by John Huston, who described her as a "creditable" actress. Besides her film and television appearances, she is best known for having nine husbands, including hotel magnate Conrad Hilton and actor George Sanders. She once stated, "Men have always liked me and I have always liked men. But I like a mannish man, a man who knows how to talk to and treat a woman – not just a man with muscles."

Early life and career
Born in Budapest (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), her birth name was Gábor Sári. She is the middle of three daughters born to Vilmos Gábor (1884–1962), a soldier, and Jolie Gábor (née Tilleman; died 1997). Gabor was named after Sári Fedák, a popular Hungarian actress. Her elder sister Magda was a socialite and her younger sister Eva was an actress and businesswoman.

Gabor's mother, Jolie, was an aunt of Annette Lantos, wife of Hungarian-born U.S. congressman and Holocaust survivor, Tom Lantos. Jolie was of Jewish descent and barely escaped Hungary after the Nazis occupied Budapest in 1944, crediting Magda's influential connections with rescuing her: "For Magda's Portuguese Ambassador I thank God. It was this man who saved my life." Gabor's maternal grandmother and uncle Sebastian (Annette Lantos's father) chose to remain in Budapest feeling they "had a good place to hide". However, both died during an Allied bombing raid. The fate of Zsa Zsa's three maternal aunts, Jolie's three sisters, remains unclear. Following studies at Madame Subilia's, a Swiss boarding school, Zsa Zsa was discovered by tenor Richard Tauber on a trip to Vienna in 1936 and was invited to sing the soubrette role in his new operetta, Der singende Traum (The Singing Dream), at the Theater an der Wien, making her first stage appearance. Author Gerold Frank, who helped Gabor write her autobiography in 1960, describes his impressions of her while the book was being written:"Zsa Zsa is unique. She's a woman from the court of Louis XV who has somehow managed to live in the 20th century, undamaged by the PTA ... She says she wants to be all the Pompadours and Du Barrys of history rolled into one, but she also says, 'I always goof. I pay all my own bills ... I want to choose the man. I do not permit men to choose me.'"

In his autobiography, television host Merv Griffin described the Gabors "in their heyday" as "glamour personified": "All these years later, it's hard to describe the phenomenon of the three glamorous Gabor girls and their ubiquitous mother. They burst onto the society pages and into the gossip columns so suddenly, and with such force, it  was as if they'd been dropped out of the sky."