Eva Gabor From Green Acres: The Smartest Gabor Sister and the Woman Who Built a Wig Empire

TLDR: Eva Gabor was the youngest of the three Gabor sisters, the first to leave Hungary, the most accomplished actress of the three, and the founder of Eva Gabor International, which became the world’s largest wig company.

She played Lisa Douglas on Green Acres for six seasons, voiced Duchess in The Aristocats and Miss Bianca in The Rescuers, and died in 1995 at 76 after a bathtub fall in Mexico.

Eddie Albert delivered her eulogy and said he probably saw more of Eva than any of her five real husbands did.

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When Eva Gabor auditioned for the role of Lisa Douglas on Green Acres, she arrived from Broadway and brought a negligee and a turkey baster as props. The other candidates for the role had come prepared with conventional audition material.

Gabor had decided that what the producers needed to see was that she was willing to be ridiculous while remaining entirely glamorous. She got the role.

It was a decision that captured something essential about her. Of the three Gabor sisters, Eva was consistently described as the most industrious, the most professionally serious, and the most genuinely funny.

She was also the one who built a business empire while her more famous sisters were generating headlines. The diamonds were real but so was the work ethic.

The First One Out of Budapest

Eva Gábor was born on February 11, 1919, in Budapest, Hungary, the youngest of three daughters born to Vilmos Gábor and Jolie Gábor. Her sisters were Magda and Zsa Zsa.

Their mother raised them to be what she described as divas, which in practice meant fluency in four languages, social grace as a professional skill, and the understanding that beauty was a form of currency.

Eva later wrote in her autobiography that while they were educated in the tools of social interaction, they were raised in a state of cultural ignorance, which was an unusually honest self-assessment from any member of the Gabor family.

In 1937, at eighteen, Eva married a Swedish-born osteopath named Eric Valdemar Drimmer and the couple moved first to London and then to America. She was the first Gabor to arrive.

Her mother and sisters followed later, with the Nazi occupation of Hungary providing additional urgency. Eva’s first marriage ended in 1942 with her citing cruelty and saying she had wanted children but her husband had objected.

She had arrived in Hollywood speaking limited English and taking whatever parts were available. Her film debut was a 1941 aviation drama called Forced Landing.

Most of the 1940s involved minor appearances and uncredited roles while she built a stage career in parallel. She replaced Vivien Leigh in the Broadway production of Tovarich in 1963 and toured nationally with it.

By then she had appeared in The Last Time I Saw Paris with Elizabeth Taylor, Artists and Models with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Gigi. The career was real and steady, which was the point.

The Three Sisters and What Made Eva Different

The Gabor sisters collectively accumulated nineteen marriages, which television host Merv Griffin once observed made them seem like they had been dropped out of the sky.

Zsa Zsa was the most famous, the one who pioneered the model of being a celebrity primarily for being a celebrity, appearing on talk shows and in gossip columns more reliably than in any sustained body of work.

Magda was the most private, with the most limited career and a particular talent for marrying men her sisters had previously married.

Eva was the one with the longest-running television success, the most demanding creative roles, and the business that outlasted all of them.

Their mother Jolie encouraged competition among her daughters while maintaining fierce family loyalty, which produced women who were simultaneously each other’s fiercest rivals and most reliable allies.

Eva predeceased both of her sisters and her mother, who lived past 100.

Lisa Douglas in a Marabou Negligee

Green Acres premiered September 15, 1965, on CBS, with Eva as Lisa Douglas, the glamorous Manhattan socialite who follows her lawyer husband Oliver to a dilapidated farm in the fictional town of Hooterville. Eddie Albert played Oliver.

The show was part of Paul Henning’s Hooterville universe alongside The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction. It ran for six seasons and 170 episodes.

The comedy of the show required Eva to be perpetually overdressed for every situation she encountered, performing farm chores in designer gowns and pearls while maintaining complete serenity about the absurdity around her.

Where Oliver struggled to understand how Hooterville worked, Lisa accepted its internal logic immediately, which made her more functional in the environment than her husband despite appearing dramatically less suited for it.

The character was not a dumb blonde but a woman operating under a coherent if idiosyncratic set of principles that happened to align with Hooterville’s surreal worldview rather than Oliver’s rational one.

Lisa’s hotcakes were a recurring gag — pancakes so rubbery they could function as gaskets or bounce when dropped. Her sewing technique involved a stapler.

Her costumes, designed by Nolan Miller, included marabou-trimmed negligees worn for activities that normally would require rubber boots. When Eddie Albert, who was a committed environmental activist, objected to the feathers she was wearing on set, Eva told him that feathers came from pillows.

He had no immediate response to this.

The working relationship between Eva and Albert became one of the genuine friendships of both their lives. They were together more hours per day during the production years than either spent with their spouses.

Albert later said in his eulogy for her that he probably saw more of Eva than any of her five real husbands did. They reunited on Broadway in You Can’t Take It with You in 1983 and made a television movie together, Return to Green Acres, in 1990.

CBS cancelled the show in 1971 as part of what became known as the rural purge, a decision to eliminate rural-themed programming regardless of ratings in favor of more urban content. Eva described Green Acres as the best work of her career.

She did not take the cancellation gracefully.

Duchess and Miss Bianca

In 1970, the year before Green Acres was cancelled, Eva voiced Duchess in Disney’s The Aristocats. Her warm, accented voice suited the elegant feline mother perfectly, and the film introduced her to a generation of children who had not grown up watching her on Saturday nights.

Her more significant Disney legacy came with Miss Bianca in The Rescuers in 1977 and its sequel The Rescuers Down Under in 1990. Miss Bianca was the Hungarian representative of the Rescue Aid Society, brave and stylishly accessorized even on dangerous missions.

The character was written with Eva’s personality in mind, which made the performance inseparable from the actress. The pairing of her sophisticated Bianca with Bob Newhart’s cautious Bernard created one of the more genuinely charming comic partnerships in Disney animation.

She noted that seeing the animators’ rendering of Miss Bianca, including the specific gestures they had captured from watching her, made her feel even closer to the character.

The Wig Empire

While the acting career was substantial, the most lasting evidence of Eva Gabor’s work ethic was her business. She founded Eva Gabor International around 1968 as a wig and hairpiece company.

This was not celebrity branding of the kind her sister Zsa Zsa practiced. Eva was involved in the actual development of the product.

Under her direction, the company introduced the capless wig, which replaced the heavy netting of conventional wigs with lace strips, dramatically improving air circulation and making the product comfortable enough for daily wear. The innovation transformed wigs from theatrical or medical accessories into mainstream fashion items.

Eva Gabor International became the world’s largest wig producer, a fact that received considerably less press coverage than her marriages but represented a more durable achievement. The Eva Gabor line continued after her death and remains a best-selling brand in more than forty countries.

Five Marriages and Merv Griffin

Eva married five times: the osteopath Drimmer, investment broker Charles Isaacs, plastic surgeon John Elbert Williams (eight months), textile manufacturer Richard Brown (thirteen years, spanning the entire Green Acres run), and aerospace executive Frank Gard Jameson Sr. (ten years, through whom she became stepmother to four children). She had no biological children.

After her final divorce in 1983, she maintained a long and close relationship with television producer and personality Merv Griffin that lasted until her death. They were seen together constantly at Hollywood functions.

Griffin described her as a very smart lady. She lived in his home during her final years.

The precise nature of the relationship was never confirmed publicly by either of them.

The Bathtub in Mexico

Eva Gabor fell in a bathtub while vacationing in Mexico in June 1995. She was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles on June 21 with a respiratory infection that became pneumonia.

She died of respiratory failure on July 4, 1995. She was 76 years old.

Her funeral was held July 11 at Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills. Eddie Albert delivered the eulogy.

Gabor was buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, near many of the people she had worked with across five decades of American entertainment.

Her mother Jolie and her sister Magda both died in 1997. Zsa Zsa, the last surviving Gabor sister, died in 2016 at 99.

Eva had been the first to leave Budapest and the first to go.

She had also, by almost any measure, done the most with the time in between.