At a party thrown by her sister in Budapest, seventeen-year-old Eva Gabor met Eric Drimmer, a handsome Swedish doctor working in Hollywood. Before the evening ended, he had proposed, and she had accepted. It was a decision that would carry her across the Atlantic and into an acting career that would ultimately make her one of the most recognizable faces on American television. Eva was born on February 11, 1919, in Budapest, Hungary, the youngest of the three famous Gabor sisters.

Her father, Vilmos, was a soldier and jeweler, while her mother, Jolie, was the heiress to a Hungarian jewelry fortune. The family’s wealth meant that her older sisters enjoyed finishing school, but an economic downturn changed those plans for Eva. Instead, she was tutored by governesses and attended the Forstner Institute in Budapest. Even at that young age, she understood the social importance of a good marriage.

Arriving in Hollywood in 1939 as a new bride, Eva quickly became consumed by the desire to act. Her first attempts were not successful. Her youthful appearance and difficulty with the English language held her back. Still, Paramount gave her bit parts in two movies that did poorly at the box office: Forced Landing in 1941 and Pacific Blackout in 1942.

Discouraged but far from defeated, she kept pursuing roles, taking secondary parts in films such as A Royal Scandal in 1945 and Song of Surrender in 1949, along with work in plays. Her fortune changed with a 1949 CBS television production of the play Ella Moore the Merrier. The performance caught the attention of Richard Rodgers, who cast her as Mignonette in his new production of The Happy Time, written with Oscar Hammerstein. The play opened in 1950, ran for eighteen months, and was an undisputed success.

At the same time, she was hosting The Eva Gabor Show on television. These successes led to frequent television appearances, including a production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya alongside Boris Karloff. Her personal life, meanwhile, was as active as her professional one. She divorced Eric Drimmer in 1942 and married millionaire Charles Isaacs the following year.

That marriage ended in 1950. The 1950s were the heyday of the Gabor women, who were frequently featured in magazines. Eva and her sister Zsa Zsa appeared on the covers of Life and Collier’s, and the three sisters even performed together in a nightclub act in Las Vegas in 1953. Their relationship was often stormy, marked by personal and professional rivalry, but they were never seriously or permanently estranged.

Eva continued to work on stage, both on and off Broadway. She starred in the short-running Little Glass Clock in 1956 and appeared in Noël Coward’s Present Laughter in 1958. Her second starring role, in a 1958 production of Lulu, was also unsuccessful. A better opportunity came in 1963, when she replaced Vivien Leigh as Tatanya in Tovarich, taking the role on a national tour.

She also appeared in several films during the decade, including The Last Time I Saw Paris in 1954, Artists and Models in 1955, Gigi in 1958, and Youngblood Hawk in 1964. For an actress who had long sought stability, stardom finally came through television. In 1965, she was cast as Lisa Douglas, the glamorous, sharp-witted wife of Eddie Albert’s Oliver Douglas, in the new CBS sitcom Green Acres. The show was a consistent presence in the Nielsen top ten, and Eva was frequently cited as the most popular actress on television.

The series ran until 1971, cementing her as a beloved figure in American pop culture. Her private life remained busy between marriages. In 1956, she married plastic surgeon John Williams, but the alliance lasted only eight months. In 1959, she wed Richard Brown, a Wall Street stockbroker, and this marriage lasted thirteen years.

In 1973, she married Frank Jameson, an aerospace mogul, and remained his wife for ten years. In total, she married and divorced five husbands. Even as she aged, Eva did not slow down. She made more than two dozen television guest appearances and lent her voice to the character Bianca in the animated Disney films The Rescuers in 1977 and The Rescuers Down Under in 1990.

In 1990, in her seventies, she reprised the role of Lisa Douglas for the television movie Return to Green Acres. Although she was the youngest of the three Gabor sisters, Eva was the first to die. On July 4, 1995, she succumbed to a respiratory infection, two years before her mother’s death in 1997. She was buried in Westfield Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

Her career stretched from the Budapest parties of her youth to the soundstages of Hollywood, through countless stage productions, films, and one iconic television role. Eva Gabor remained a fixture of American entertainment for more than five decades, and her death marked the end of an era for a family that had become as famous for its own dramas as for the performances of its members.