Given that she turned her life into a one long, glorious performance, it’s easy to forget that Zsa Zsa Gabor also made movies. The former Miss Hungary, who has died at the age of 99, arrived in the United States in 1941 with a smattering of stage experience in Vienna after being discovered by famed tenor Richard Tauber. Having turned down the lead in a mooted 1949 adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (she found the material too racy), Gabor debuted as a model named Zsa Zsa in Mervyn LeRoy’s musical Lovely to Look At (1952).
Art anticipated life in her second outing, as Gabor (who would marry nine times) plays a bride scheming to make off with husband Louis Calhern’s fortune in the fourth vignette of Edmund Goulding’s anthology, We’re Not Married (1952). But, even though she landed the rare leading role of chanteuse Jane Avril in the Toulouse-Lautrec biopic Moulin Rouge (1952), she failed to impress director John Huston, who threatened to shoot her for fudging her lines and moving “like a tank”.
Gabor did better alongside Leslie Caron, however, as a bar flirt in Vincente Minnelli’s contribution to The Story of Three Loves and as magician Jean-Pierre Aumont’s assistant in Charles Walters’s Lili (both 1953). Moreover, despite her younger sister Eva emerging as the better actor, Gabor held her own as a trapeze artist opposite Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in 3 Ring Circus (1954).
She had to wait two years for her next assignment – as a wealthy widow being exploited by her third ex-husband (George Sanders) in Death of a Scoundrel (1956) – but two roles came at once in The Girl in the Kremlin (1957), a preposterous piece of Red-baiting propaganda that saw Gabor play a Lithuanian seeking the nurse twin who has accompanied Joseph Stalin to Greece after he faked his own death and underwent cosmetic surgery.
The Cold War also dominated Herbert Wilcox’s The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk, which brought Gabor to Britain to play an FBI agent. But 1958 also saw her cameoing as a strip club owner in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil and starring as the Venusian rebel aiding some imprisoned astronauts in Edward Bernds’ Queen of Outer Space, a sci-fi romp that cemented her reputation for being difficult on set.
Consequently, despite flirting amiably with Mario Lanza in his swan song, For the First Time (1959), Gabor began to find herself confined to guest spots in the likes of Boys’ Night Out (1962), Picture Mommy Dead and Drop Dead Darling (both 1966).
She camped it up as Mata Hari alongside Frankie Howerd in Up the Front (1976) and delivered double entendres with blithe insouciance as the owner of a missing necklace in Every Girl Should Have One (1978). But she was merely a fleeting presence in Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie (1984), A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), The Naked Truth (1992), The Beverly Hillbillies (1993) and A Very Brady Sequel (1996).
Yet Gabor often stole the show in TV favourites like Batman (1968), The Love Boat (1980), As the World Turns (1981) and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (1989), in which she played the Goddess of Commitment. And who can forget her recreating her slapping encounter with a LAPD traffic cop in David Zucker’s The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991)?
