Zsa Zsa Gabor

Zsa Zsa Gabor, the jet-setting Hungarian actress who made a career out of multiple marriages, conspicuous wealth and jaded wisdom about the glamorous life, has died. She was 99.

The middle and most famous of the sisters Gabor died Sunday of a heart attack at her Los Angeles home, said her husband Frederic von Anhalt.

“We tried everything, but her heart just stopped and that was it,” he said. “Even the ambulance tried very hard to get her back, but there was no way.”

Gabor had been hospitalized repeatedly since she broke her right hip in 2010 after a fall at her Bel-Air home. She already had to use a wheelchair after being partly paralyzed in a 2002 car accident and suffering a stroke in 2005. Most of her right leg was amputated in January 2011 because of gangrene. Von Anhalt duly reported her misfortunes to the media.

The great aunt of Paris Hilton and a spiritual matriarch to the Kardashians and other tabloid favorites, she was the original hall-of-mirrors celebrity, famous for being famous for being famous. Starting in the 1940s, Gabor rose from beauty queen to millionaire’s wife to minor television personality to minor film actress to major public character. With no special talent, no hit TV series such as her sister Eva’s “Green Acres,” Zsa Zsa nevertheless was a long-running hit just being Zsa Zsa — her accent drenched in diamonds, her name synonymous with frivolity and camp as she winked and carried on about men, dahling, and the droll burdens of the idle rich.

She was like popcorn for the public and, for sociologists, the seeming fulfillment of the mindless future imagined in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” a creation made possible by mass, electronic media; her image beamed into theaters and living rooms, on the Internet and the shelves of newsstands.

Her secret, in part, was being in on the joke, once saying about a TV role, “I play a fabulously rich woman who has just bought her fifth husband; she is very unhappy. I won’t tell you who it’s supposed to be.”

She wed eight times — nine including a 1982 shipboard ceremony that was quickly annulled and may not have been legal. Other husbands included businessman Herbert L. Hutner and prolific inventor Jack Ryan, credited with designing everything from missiles to the Barbie doll. She is survived by von Anhalt, whom she married in 1986.