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Prince: Zsa Zsa Gabor's recovery is 'up and down'

By Alan Duke, CNN
Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband Prince Frederic Von Anhalt said Gabor's recovery from hip replacement surgery is "up and down."
Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband Prince Frederic Von Anhalt said Gabor's recovery from hip replacement surgery is "up and down."
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Gabor's husband says actress' condition is "critical"
  • Her daughter reports a more optimistic "guarded" condition
  • The glamour icon underwent hip replacement surgery July 19
  • Gabor fell while answering a phone
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Los Angeles, California (CNN) -- How well Zsa Zsa Gabor is recovering from hip replacement surgery a week ago depends on whom you ask: her husband or her daughter.

Prince Frederic Von Anhalt said his wife of 24 years is in "critical" condition, but daughter Francesca Hilton said her condition is "guarded."

Gabor, 93, suffered a broken hip in a fall at her Bel Air, California, home nine days ago.

"It's up and down," Von Anhalt said Monday afternoon. "It worries me very much."

The publicist for Hilton, however, gave a more optimistic report. Edward Lozzi said the glamour icon was able to sit up in bed and talk, an improvement that followed a blood transfusion and the removal of her morphine drip over the weekend.

Gabor has "rallied" and is "more talkative," Lozzi said.

She is still in the intensive care unit at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, but the prince's publicist, John Blanchette, said she could go home as soon as Thursday.

Gabor's fall happened as she reached to answer the phone while watching the television game show "Jeopardy," which is "a must-see show" for the actress, her husband said.

Gabor has been frail and "pretty much confined to a wheelchair" since a 2002 car accident, according to Blanchette. The crash occurred when the car in which she was riding with her hairdresser slammed into a light pole on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Von Anhalt is either Gabor's eighth or ninth husband, depending on whether you count one marriage that was quickly annulled.

Francesca Hilton is her only child, the product of her second marriage to hotel magnate Conrad Hilton.

The glamorous Hungarian-born actress, the second of the three celebrated Gabor sisters, is most famous for her many marriages. Among her other husbands was Oscar-winning actor George Sanders.

Her more prominent films include John Huston's 1952 Toulouse-Lautrec biopic, "Moulin Rouge"; "The Story of Three Loves," 1953; "The Girl in the Kremlin," 1957; and Orson Welles' classic "Touch of Evil," 1958.

In 1989, Gabor was sentenced to 72 hours in jail for slapping a Beverly Hills police officer after a traffic stop. She also had to perform community service at a battered women's shelter.

The other Gabor sisters were Magda, the oldest, who died in 1997 five days shy of 83, and Eva, the youngest, who died in 1995 at 76.

Magda, an occasional stage actress, also was married to Sanders at one time.

Eva is probably best remembered for her role as a socialite turned farmer's wife on the 1960s TV sitcom "Green Acres."