Gaby Deslys - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

Deslys contracted a severe throat infection caused by influenza in December 1919. She was operated on multiple times in an effort to eradicate the infection, on two occasions without the use of an anesthetic. Surgeons were inhibited by Deslys' demand that they not scar her neck. She died in Paris in February 1920.

In her will Gaby Deslys left her villa on the Marseilles Corniche Road, and all of her property in Marseilles, to the poor of Marseilles. The property was valued at half a million dollars.

Her carved and gilded bed, in the form of an enormous swan, was bought at auction by the Universal Studios prop department, and was used in the 1925 film of The Phantom of the Opera. In 1950 it was in Sunset Boulevard as the bed of Norma Desmond.

In 1943, her life story was bought by MGM as a potential film property for Judy Garland to be produced by Arthur Freed, but it was eventually shelved.

In 1986 James Gardiner wrote a biography of Deslys life, Gaby Deslys: A Fatal Attraction.