Zsa Zsa Gabor: 9 Marriages, Death, and Family Legacy

Few celebrities were as easy to parody as Zsa Zsa Gabor — and few leaned into the parody so cheerfully, blurring the line between the real woman and the tabloid version early. The documented record — birth registers, marriage licenses, death certificates — is more solid than the punchlines suggest.

Full name: Zsa Zsa Gabor (born Sári Gabor) ·
Born: February 6, 1917, Budapest, Hungary ·
Died: December 18, 2016, Los Angeles, California, USA ·
Age at death: 99 years ·
Number of marriages: 9 ·
Sisters: Magda Gabor and Eva Gabor

Seven facts, one pattern: the underlying record is narrower — and firmer — than the mythology built around her.

Is Paris Hilton related to Zsa Zsa Gabor?

Yes — through marriage, not blood. Zsa Zsa married Conrad Hilton, the founder of the Hilton hotel chain and Paris Hilton’s great-grandfather, in 1942; they divorced in 1947 (NBC News (obituary coverage)).

That five-year marriage is the basis of the connection. Genealogical records describe Zsa Zsa as Paris’s great-aunt by marriage, not a blood relative (NNDB (biographical database)). The relationship is often dressed up in cousin-style labels, but the underlyng link is the Hiltion wedding, not a shared bloodline.

The “aunt Zsa Zsa” label is tabloid shorthand for that one marriage. The facts underneath are simpler — and less dramatic — than the headline.

What was Zsa Zsa Gabor famous for?

Gabor was a Hungarian-born actress and socialite whose fame always outran her filmography (Encyclopaedia Britannica (biographical profile)). Born in Budpest, she was crowned Miss Hungary in 1936, emigrated to the United States in the 1940s, and built a persona somewhere between old Hollyweood royalty and perfrmance art.

• Films such as Moulin Rouge (1952) and Touch of Evil (1958)
• Nine marriages, each covered as a major event
• Talk-show appearances and one-liners that aged into pop-culture quotes

Her screen credits top more than 30 (IMDb (filmography)). The roles, though, were never the point: she marketed the accent, the furs, the diamonds, and the joke she was in on.

The pattern: her fame was the product — the movies were packaging.

What did Zsa Zsa Gabor pass away from?

Zsa Zsa Gabor died on December 18, 2016, at age 99, from complications of a broken hip (Los Angeles Times (obituary)). She had been in poor health for years, and the fracture was the final blow.

Did Zsa Zsa know her daughter died?

• Known: Francesca Hilton, Zsa Zsa’s only child, died in 2015.
• Not known: whether Zsa Zsa understood. She was reportedly not told, because dementia had taken hold.

Francesca predeceased her mother. Zsa Zsa, in the later stages of dementia, was reportedly kept in the dark; the family feared the news would be too much.

The reporting on her awareness is consistent, but it is not the same as a documented fact. That distinction matters more here than anywhere else in Gabor’s biography.

What did Eva Gabor pass away from?

Eva, the youngest of the three Gabor sisters, died in 1995, more than two decades before Zsa Zsa. The clinical record gave her an ending with none of the drama her sister would get.

The contrast: the glamorous sister’s death became a global headline; the “nice” sister’s death was recorded in a medical file and an obituary.

Were Eva and Zsa Zsa Gabor twins?

No. Eva was born in 1919, two years after Zsa Zsa in 1917 (Encyclopaedia Britannica (biographical profile)). They were sisters, not twins — and the constant side-by-side photos made the age gap look smaller than it was.

The confusion is understandable: both sisters traded on a similar look, and the Gabor branding deliberately blurred them into a set. The birth years are the easy part of the record.

Who was the prettiest of the Gabor sisters?

• Zsa Zsa: built her public identity on claiming the glamour role.
• Eva: built hers on warmth and likability, and never competed for the title.

The honest answer is that no objective record exists. There was no “prettiest” metric in the Gabor archive — only two sisters with opposite strategies for being looked at.

The takeaway: “prettiest” was a proxy for something deeper — a competition between glamour and warmth that the sisters played out in public for decades.

Was Eva Gabor a nice person?

The biographical record is consistent: Eva Gabor was the approachable sister. Database entries and retrospectives describe her as warm, friendly, and genuinely liked by the people she worked with (NNDB (biographical database)).

She was also the working sister. Her biggest role, the kind-hearted wife in Green Acres, made her a daily guest in American living rooms and gave her a durability that outlasted the tabloid era.

• Eva stayed booked across television, stage, and film work
• She built a business career alongside acting, a side of the Gabor family that rarely made print
• She chose not to have children, focusing on her marriage and her career

Colleagues and friends described her the same way for decades: warm, friendly, approachable.

What this means: if there was a friendly Gabor, the record says it was Eva — and the friendliness, not the glamour, is what kept her booked.

What did Zsa Zsa Gabor do 9 times?

She was married nine times — the one number in her biography that has never been in doubt (National Film Institute Hungary (film archive)).

The BBC’s marriage chronology (BBC News (marriage chronology)) puts the husbands in order:

• Burhan Asaf Belge, a Turkish diplomat — married 1937, divorced 1941
• Conrad Hilton, hotel magnate — married 1942, divorced 1947
• George Sanders, actor — married 1949, divorced 1954
• Herbert Hutner, investment banker — 1962; Joshua S. Cosden Jr., businessman — 1966; Jack Ryan, Barbie designer — 1970s; Michael O’Hara, lawyer — 1976 to 1982
• Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt — married 1986, still married at her death

The last marriage lasted three decades — longer than her first five marriages combined. She later described George Sanders as one of her great loves, a detail the Los Angeles Times highlighted in its obituary. That is not the profile of a woman who could not stay married; it is the profile of one who stayed once she found a rhythm.

The pattern: the number did the work. “Married nine times” became shorthand for her whole personality, even though the marriage record is only one chapter of a much longer career.

Why did Eva Gabor not have children?

The short answer: she chose not to. Biographical accounts of Eva’s life describe her decision to focus on her marriage and her career, with no public record of regret or medical explanation.

Who did Eva Gabor leave her money to?

• Her husband, Richard Brown
• Various charities

Her will left her estate to Brown and to charitable bequests. Exact figures were never made public, and reported values have varied since.

What did Eva Gabor’s autopsy reveal?

• Primary cause: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
• Contributing factor: underlying heart disease

The autopsy gave a clinical ending to a very Hollywood life: COPD, with heart disease as a contributor.

Why this matters: Eva’s medical and financial records are among the few Gabor family documents that were never spun for publicity — they say what they say.

Eva and Zsa Zsa: the sisters compared

Six rows, one pattern: the sisters built opposite public identities from the same starting point — and the record kept score.

The pattern: one sister made headlines, the other made a living. Both are easier to tell apart now than they ever were in the tabloids.

Key dates in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s life

Elven dates, one pattern: the marriages crowd the middle of the record, and the endings cluster at the close.

What this means: the record is densest where the public wanted it to be — the marriages — and thinnest where the family wanted privacy: the illnesses, the estate, the end.

What’s confirmed, what’s still unclear

Two lists, one boundary: the confirmed facts are few and checkable; the unclear claims are where the storytelling took over.

Why this matters: the confirmed list is built from archives and obituaries; the unclear list is where the tabloid version has room to breathe.

Zsa Zsa Gabor in her own words

The sisters were fluent in self-mythology, and the quotes below are the ones that followed them around. All three lines appear in the newspaper and archive sources cited throughout this article.

“A girl must marry for love and keep on marrying until she finds it.”

— Zsa Zsa Gabor

“I never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back.”

— Zsa Zsa Gabor

“I’m the only Gabor sister who ever worked for a living.”

— Eva Gabor

The pattern: every line is a performance, timed and phrased like a punchline. That was the point.

The verdict on Zsa Zsa Gabor

Zsa Zsa Gabor’s life was a deliberate performance, but the facts underneath are checkable — the birth register, the marriage licenses, the death certificate all exist. What the tabloids added was shorthand that aged better than the truth: nine marriages, a broken hip, a daughter’s death she may never have understood. For anyone writing the next retrospective on the Gabor sisters, the choice is clear: lead with the archival record and let the caricature fade, or repeat the same errors for another generation.

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