Zsa Zsa Gabor (February 6, 1917 – December 18, 2016) was a Hungarian-American socialite and actress. Her sisters were socialite Magda Gabor and actress and businesswoman Eva Gabor. In the 1930s and 1940s, Zsa Zsa Gabor transformed from a Hungarian beauty queen into a high-society Hollywood icon, though her career as a film actress hadn't yet begun in earnest. During these decades, she was primarily defined by her European stage roots and her high-profile marriages.
Gabor was crowned Miss Hungary in 1936. However, she was famously disqualified from the competition because she was under the required age at the time (she was 19, but the pageant rules were strict or she had misrepresented her age during the entry process). Before moving to America, she was “discovered” by the operatic tenor Richard Tauber in 1934 and sang the soubrette role in the operetta The Singing Dream in Vienna.
In 1937, she married Burhan Asaf Belge, the Press Director for the Turkish Foreign Ministry. She moved to Ankara, Turkey, with him, where she claimed to have had a brief, scandalous romance with the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Gabor arrived in the United States in 1941, following her sister Eva, who had moved to Hollywood a few years earlier. Upon her arrival, she didn’t immediately find work in films. Instead, she became a fixture of the New York and Hollywood social scenes.
Her most significant move of the decade was marrying hotel tycoon Conrad Hilton in 1942. During this marriage, they had Zsa Zsa's only child, Francesca Hilton, born in 1947. Zsa Zsa later claimed that Hilton was controlling and even tried to change her name to “Georgia” to make her sound more American.
By the end of the decade, she had divorced Hilton and married British actor George Sanders, which further cemented her place in the Hollywood inner circle.
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