Zsa Zsa Gabor remains 'feisty'

(AP)

Zsa Zsa Gabor smiled and ate ice cream on Saturday, a day after doctors amputated much of the actress's leg to fight a gangrene infection that could have killer her.

"She talks to me and she smiles a little bit," her husband Frederic Prinz von Anhalt said.

Mr Von Anhalt and John Blanchette, a spokesman for the 93-year-old Gabor, said the star of the 1950s movies Moulin Rouge and Lili still does not know her leg was amputated. Mr Blanchette said doctors are "guardedly optimistic" about the actress's recovery. "She was chatty and feisty this morning," he said.

Gabor is currently hospitalised at the UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Centre in Los Angeles. She fell at home and broke her hip in July last year and since that time has been in and out of the hospital.