Zsa Zsa Gabor’s daughter on Friday denied a report that her mother was critically ill and not responding to human contact.
“She is not in a coma. She is not on any kind of deathwatch. She is responsive and on medications. All vital signs are still going strong, and she is talking,” Constance Francesca Hilton said in a statement.
The 93-year-old actress and tabloid fixation had been reported by her publicist to be in critical condition following hip replacement surgery.
“She is still in the hospital in critical condition,” John Blanchette said. “Her husband talked to her doctors yesterday [Thursday] and they said that she is not responding and not communicating.”
Gabor underwent surgery following a bad fall on July 17 when she broke her hip.
Blanchette initially said the surgery “was very successful.”
Gabor fell from her bed at her
posh Bel Air, California home when she reached to answer the phone
while watching her favorite television show, Jeopardy.
The Hungarian-born actress and former beauty queen was left partially paralyzed and wheelchair-bound after a 2002 car accident. She also had a stroke in 2005.
Her lengthy film career includes spots in a dozen films and television series, including John Huston’s 1952 Moulin Rouge and the 1958 film noir Touch of Evil by Orson Welles. She lent her voice to several animated films and TV series.
But Gabor is especially known for her flamboyant lifestyle, legal troubles, nine marriages and a propensity to call just about everyone “darling” with her distinctive accent.
In other celebrity news, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie accepted undisclosed damages on Thursday from a Sunday newspaper in Britain over claims they were separating, their lawyer said.
The unmarried actors had sued the News of the World on privacy grounds over a front-page story in January that claimed they had consulted a lawyer and were dividing up their assets and access to their six children.
The story was picked up by media organizations around the world, but the tabloid newspaper has now agreed to publish an apology and pay the couple their costs and damages, their lawyer Keith Schilling said.
Schilling said the couple’s US lawyers had written to the newspaper to inform it the allegations were false but it failed to issue a retraction, and the publication “spawned an array of false stories” all over the world.
“In consequence, when the News of the World failed to publicly retract the allegations and apologize for them — thereby leaving their readers in the dark as to the true position — the couple felt they had no alternative than to sue,” Schilling said after the hearing in London’s High Court.
The News of the World, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News International group and one of Britain’s biggest-selling papers, said it would not be commenting on the case.
While Pitt and Jolie failed to see the funny side, the Terminator found humor in the Road Warrior’s recent troubles.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wise-cracked about Mel Gibson on Wednesday, comparing him to the Gulf of Mexico oil leak.
Schwarzenegger told a group of utility commissioners in Sacramento that while BP appears to have contained its well, “no one has figured out how to contain Mel Gibson.”
A celebrity Web site has posted audio recordings of what it says are Gibson’s profanity-laced tirades against his ex-girlfriend.
Schwarzenegger also told participants to turn off their cell-phones “because we are expecting a call from him.”
Gibson’s spokesman Alan Nierob says he is happy to hear that Schwarzenegger is maintaining a sense of humor, adding, “He’s obviously paving the way for a return to showbiz.”
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The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
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