page_title: Zsa Zsa Gabor
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Zsa Zsa Gabor / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Candid press photo of Zsa Zsa Gabor and director Nicholas Ray.
context_page_description: Zsa Zsa Gabor was a Hungarian-American actress and socialite. Her sisters were actresses Eva and Magda Gabor.
  Gabor began her stage career in Vienna and was crowned Miss Hungary in 1936. She emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1941. Becoming a sought-after actress with "European flair and style", she was considered to have a personality that "exuded charm and grace". Her first film role was a supporting role in Lovely to Look At. She later acted in We're Not Married! and played one of her few leading roles in the John Huston-directed film, Moulin Rouge. Huston would later describe her as a "creditable" actress.
  Outside her acting career, Gabor was known for her extravagant Hollywood lifestyle, her glamorous personality, and her many marriages. In total, Gabor had 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."
context_section_description: According to Gabor, she was discovered by operatic tenor Richard Tauber on a trip to Vienna in 1934, following her time as a student at a Swiss boarding school. Tauber invited Gabor to sing the soubrette role in his new operetta, Der singende Traum (The Singing Dream), at the Theater an der Wien.  This would mark her first stage appearance. In 1936, she was crowned Miss Hungary.
  In 1944, she co-wrote a novel with writer Victoria Wolf entitled Every Man For Himself.  According to Gabor, the fictional story was derived, in a small part, from Gabor's life experiences.  The book was subsequently bought by an American magazine. In 1949, Gabor declined an offer to play the leading role in a film version of the classic book Lady Chatterley's Lover.  According to an article written for the Cedar Rapids Gazette in 1949, she turned down the role of Lady Chatterley due to the story's controversial theme.
  Her more serious film acting credits include Moulin Rouge, Lovely to Look At and We're Not Married!, all from 1952, and 1953's Lili. In 1958, she ran the gamut of moviemaking, from Touch of Evil (1958) to the camp oddity Queen of Outer Space (1958). Later, she appeared in such films as Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood (1976) and Frankenstein's Great Aunt Tillie (1984). She did cameos for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), The Beverly Hillbillies (1993) and A Very Brady Sequel (1996) and voiced a character in the animated Happily Ever After (1990).
  She was also a regular guest on television shows, appearing with Milton Berle, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Howard Stern, David Frost, Arsenio Hall, Phil Donahue, and Joan Rivers. She was a guest on the Bob Hope specials, the Dean Martin Roasts, Hollywood Squares, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, and It's Garry Shandling's Show. In 1968, she appeared in the role of Minerva on an episode of Batman, becoming the show's final "special guest villain" when it was cancelled soon after. She appeared on the Late Night show where she told host David Letterman about her blind date with Henry Kissinger, which was arranged by Richard Nixon.
  Author Gerold Frank, who helped Gabor write her autobiography in 1960, described his impressions of her:
  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, who was known to spend time with Gabor's younger sister Eva socially, wrote of the Gabor sisters' initial presence in New York and Hollywood: "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."
  In 1973 she was the guest roastee on the Dean Martin Roast show, and in 1998, film historian Neal Gabler called her kind of celebrity "The Zsa Zsa Factor".
caption: Dancing with director Nicholas Ray (1953)
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