Magdolna "Magda" Gabor (June 11, 1915 – June 6, 1997) was a Hungarian-American actress and socialite, and the elder sister of
Zsa Zsa
Zsa Zsa (also Zsazsa, ) is a given name originated as the baby pet name of Zsa Zsa Gabor (1917–2016), Hungarian-American actress and socialite.
Notable people, characters, and animals with the name include:
People
* Zsa Zsa Gabor (1917–201 ...
and
Eva Gabor
Eva Gabor ( ; February 11, 1919 – July 4, 1995) was a Hungarian-American actress, businesswoman, singer, and socialite. She voiced Duchess and Miss Bianca in the animated Disney Classics, ''The Aristocats'' (1970), ''The Rescuers'' (1977), ...
.
Early life
The eldest daughter of a jeweler,
Jolie (1896–1997),
and a soldier, Vilmos Gábor (1881–1962), she was born in 1915 in Budapest. Her parents were both from Jewish families. She is listed in ''Hungary: Jewish Names from the Central Zionist Archives'', under her first married name, as "Magda Bychowsky".
[The online database is based in ]Provo, Utah
Provo ( ) is the fourth-largest city in Utah, United States. It is south of Salt Lake City along the Wasatch Front. Provo is the largest city and county seat of Utah County and is home to Brigham Young University (BYU).
Provo lies between the ...
: The Generations Network, Inc. (2008); information accessed at http://www.ancestry.com on December 30, 2011.
During World War II, Gabor was reported to have been the fiancée of the Portuguese ambassador to Hungary,
Carlos Sampaio Garrido
Carlos de Almeida Afonseca Sampaio Garrido (5 April 1883 – April 1960) was a Portuguese diplomat credited with saving the lives of approximately 1,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary while serving as Portugal's ambassador in Budapest between Jul ...
; another source claims she was his mistress and another claims she was his aide. After she fled to Portugal in 1944, following the
Nazi occupation of Hungary, and, with Sampaio's assistance, she was reportedly the mistress of a Spanish nobleman,
José Luis de Vilallonga
José is a predominantly Spanish and Portuguese form of the given name Joseph. While spelled alike, this name is pronounced differently in each language: Spanish ; Portuguese (or ).
In French, the name ''José'', pronounced , is an old vernacul ...
. Gabor arrived in the United States in February 1946, from
Natal, Brazil
Natal ( ) is the capital and largest city of the state of Rio Grande do Norte, located in northeastern Brazil. According to IBGE's 2021 estimate, the city had a total population o896,708 making it the 19th largest city in the country. Natal is a ...
. Within a year of her arrival she married an American citizen, William Rankin, and remained in the country.
Marriages
Gabor was married six times. She was widowed twice, divorced three times, and one marriage was annulled. All the unions were childless. Her husbands, in chronological order, were:
* Jan Bychowsky (m. November 19, 1937 – May 22, 1944; his death), a reputed Polish count and
RAF pilot. Gabor gave her name as "Magda de Bychowsky" and her marital status as divorced on a February 11, 1946 airline passenger manifest, accessed on ancestry.com, December 30, 2011; according to this form, she had left her city of residence (Lisbon, Portugal), where she lived at 17 Buenos Aires, and arrived in New York City to visit her family.
* William M. Rankin (m. December 3, 1946 – August 11, 1947; divorced) an American playwright and screenwriter (''
The Harvey Girls
''The Harvey Girls'' is a 1946 Technicolor American musical film produced by Arthur Freed for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It is based on the 1942 The Harvey Girls (novel), novel of the same name by Samuel Hopkins Adams, about Fred Harvey (entrepreneur ...
'', among other films); they divorced in Los Angeles in 1947. He was born on March 31, 1900 and died in March 1966.
* Sidney Robert Warren (m. July 14, 1949 – 1950; divorced) an attorney. They married in
Riverhead, Long Island, New York in 1949, and divorced the following year.
* Arthur "Tony" Gallucci (m. April 1, 1956 – January 22, 1967; his death), president of Samuel Gallucci & Son, "one of the oldest building contracting concerns in the United States". They wed in
Franklin, New Jersey
Franklin is a borough in Sussex County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. As of the 2010 United States Census, the borough's population was 5,045[George Sanders
George Henry Sanders (3 July 1906 – 25 April 1972) was a British actor and singer whose career spanned over 40 years. His heavy, upper-class English accent and smooth, bass voice often led him to be cast as sophisticated but villainous chara ...]
(m. December 5, 1970 – January 6, 1971;
annulled
Annulment is a legal procedure within secular and religious legal systems for declaring a marriage null and void. Unlike divorce, it is usually retroactive, meaning that an annulled marriage is considered to be invalid from the beginning almost ...
) a British actor, who had previously been married to her sister
Zsa Zsa
Zsa Zsa (also Zsazsa, ) is a given name originated as the baby pet name of Zsa Zsa Gabor (1917–2016), Hungarian-American actress and socialite.
Notable people, characters, and animals with the name include:
People
* Zsa Zsa Gabor (1917–201 ...
. They married in
Riverside, California
Riverside is a city in and the county seat of Riverside County, California, United States, in the Inland Empire metropolitan area. It is named for its location beside the Santa Ana River. It is the most populous city in the Inland Empire an ...
.
["Notes on People", ''The New York Times'', February 19, 1975.]
* Tibor R. Heltai (m. August 5, 1972 – 1975; divorced) an economic consultant who became a real-estate broker. They married in
Southampton, New York
Southampton, officially the Town of Southampton, is a town in southeastern Suffolk County, New York, partly on the South Fork of Long Island. As of the 2020 U.S. census, the town had a population of 69,036. Southampton is included in the stret ...
in 1972, separated in June 1973 and divorced two years later in 1975.
[
]
Death
Gabor died on June 6, 1997, five days before her 82nd birthday and two months after the death of her mother. The cause was kidney failure
Kidney failure, also known as end-stage kidney disease, is a medical condition in which the kidneys can no longer adequately filter waste products from the blood, functioning at less than 15% of normal levels. Kidney failure is classified as eit ...
. She was interred next to her mother in Desert Memorial Park
Desert Memorial Park is a cemetery in Cathedral City, California, United States, near Palm Springs. Opening in 1956 and receiving its first interment in 1957,The Palm Springs Cemetery District itself was covers 504 square miles, including Palm Spr ...
in Cathedral City, California
Cathedral City, colloquially known as "Cat City", is a desert resort city in Riverside County, California, United States, within the Colorado Desert's Coachella Valley. Situated between Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage, the city has the second larg ...
.''Explorer's Guide''
/ref>
Filmography
See also
* Gabor sisters
The Gabor sisters were three Hungarian-American actresses/socialites: Magda (June 11, 1915 – June 6, 1997), Zsa Zsa (February 6, 1917 – December 18, 2016), and Eva (February 11, 1919 – July 4, 1995). Born in Budapest, Hungary, the trio rel ...
Bibliography
*
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gabor, Magda
1915 births
1997 deaths
20th-century American actresses
20th-century Hungarian actresses
Actresses from Budapest
Actresses from Palm Springs, California
Age controversies
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American television actresses
American socialites
Burials at Desert Memorial Park
Deaths from kidney failure
Magda
Magda is a feminine given name, sometimes a short form ( hypocorism) of names such as Magdalena, which may refer to:
* Magda Apanowicz (born 1985), Canadian actress
* Magda B. Arnold (1903–2002), Czechoslovakian-born American psychologist
* M ...
Hungarian emigrants to the United States
Hungarian Jews
Hungarian socialites
Hungarian television actresses
Jewish American actresses
Naturalized citizens of the United States
20th-century American Jews