Eva Gabor passes
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This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from July 1995.
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Miss Gabor died at 10:05 am at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center from respiratory distress and other infections, hospital spokesman Ron Wise said. She entered the hospital 21 June after falling and breaking her hip, Wise said. She also was found to be suffering from pneumonia, he said.
Several family members were at Miss Gabor's bedside when she died, Wise said.
The Hungarian-born Eva; sisters Zsa Zsa and Magda; and their mother, Jolie, all emigrated to the United States in the 1930s and '40s. By the 1950s, the family, especially Eva and Zsa Zsa, had achieved worldwide celebrity.
"There are four women in our family, and we're all doing well ...," Miss Gabor said in a 1961 Associated Press interview. "We worked very hard, but we were also very lucky."
Frederick von Anhalt, Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband, described his sister-in-law as "brilliant, fabulous woman."
"She didn't deserve that sickness and she didn't deserve to die," he said. "She was the most wonderful woman I have ever known. She was always sweet, kind to everybody, always friendly, never a bad word." "Green Acres," which ran on CBS from 1965 to 1971, cast Gabor as a Park Avenue penthouse dweller transplanted to rural Hooterville because lawyer husband Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert) preferred fresh air to Times Square. Lisa Douglas preferred Manhattan stores to farm chores and wore gowns in the kitchen as she fried up hotcakes and entertained her neighbour's pet pig, Arnold. The Gabor girls were born to an upper-middleclass Budapest family that at first did not approve of their interest in show business. Nonetheless, Miss Gabor moved to Hollywood in 1939 and soon landed a contract with Paramount Pictures. Her career took off when she played an unemployed acrobat in the 1950 Broadway show "The Happy Time." Success in the theatre production earned her guest roles on television variety shows and led to her own interview program, "The Eva Gabor Show." It was during this period that the much-married sisters gained notoriety for their love lives.
Eva Gabor, married at least five times, was credited with coming up with the truism: "Marriage is too interesting an experiment to be tried only once or twice." Van Anhalt said that while the sisters sometimes had their differences "they loved each other very, very much." He said Zsa Zsa "was in bad shape when she heard that she died."
Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor were often mistaken for one another, although the older sister's legal troubles, including a highly publicised run-in with a police office, gave her the more colourful reputation.
"It's awfully boring to be called the 'good Gabor,'" Eva Gabor said in a 1990 interview.
