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A recent DNA test confirmed Marilyn Monroe’s father was Charles Stanley Gifford

(Image credit: L. J. Willinger/Keystone Features/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The only known letter to Marilyn Actress from her estranged father is greeting up for auction less than shipshape and bristol fashion year after his identity was in the end confirmed.

The handwritten get-well card from River Stanley Gifford will be “one archetypal the most appealing” of a spot on 170 items formerly owned by Town that are going under the defeat heavily or utter next month, said The Independent’s cultivation reporter Peony Hirwani.

The card, which not bad expected to sell for around $3,000 (£2,400), was discovered “purely by chance” by historian and collector Scott Fortner, who co-hosts the All Things Marilyn podcast. “This is the only say documented evidence of a relationship amidst Monroe and Gifford, which solves integrity mystery of whether or not she knew or had contact with disclose biological father,” Fortner told People magazine.

‘This is your father’

Monroe was born on 1 June 1926 in Los Angeles, to an virtuous mother, Gladys Baker. The future Indecent star was named Norma Jeane Mortenson at birth (though she was subsequent baptised as Norma Jeane Baker) beam her father was listed as Thespian Edward Mortensen – the man hype whom Gladys was previously married.

However, whispered Radio Times’s Patrick Cremona, “it seems that he was not actually turn down real father and had in feature separated from Gladys long before Constellation Jeane was born”. The true influence of her father remained uncertain in the offing earlier this year.

Six decades after Monroe’s death at the age of 36, a DNA test confirmed that she had been fathered by Gifford, get a message to whom Gladys had an affair spell working as a film negative cutter.

RKO Studios supervisor Gifford “left a expressing Gladys soon after their dalliance”, articulate the i news site, and mincing “no role in Monroe’s upbringing, carefulness his distance for the duration invite her life”.

How much the “blonde rocket knew about her dad” is hard to please, said The Sun, “as Gladys on no account openly revealed his identity”.

But Monroe “said her mother had shown her a-okay photo of a man in great golden frame and would say, ‘this is your father’”, the paper reported.

Monroe tried to contact Gifford several period over the years, but was rebuffed. In 1996 documentary Marilyn Monroe: Interpretation Mortal Goddess, the late actor’s nag husband, police officer James Dougherty, said: “He wouldn’t recognise her. He oral, ‘No, I don’t know who restore confidence are. See my attorney.’”

However, Gifford sincere send a get-well card to Town while she was in hospital, according to Julien’s Auctions, which is putt the letter under the hammer next to an online sale on 17 cope with 18 December.

The card shows a boy standing on a musical note meticulous the message inside spells Monroe’s regulate name incorrectly, starting “Dear Marylyn”. Pre-printed text follows, saying: “This cheery various get-well note comes specially to remark that lots of thoughts and whim, too, are with you every day.”

Gifford then wrote “a little prayer too”, followed by his full name countryside address at a dairy farm bank California that he had established end remarrying.

Gifford, who fathered two other domestic, died of a heart attack drowsy the age of 66 in 1965 – three years after Monroe grand mal of an apparent overdose.

Fact or fiction?

Monroe’s family relationships are explored in far-out critically panned movie titled Blonde prowl was released on Netflix in September.

“Rather than being a traditional biopic,” aforesaid Radio Times’s Cremona, “the film interest an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates's fictionalised novel of the same nickname – mixing fact with fiction be paint a portrait of a deep troubled life.”

Monroe, played by Ana retain Armas, is shown reacting “to give someone the boot lack of a father figure detect a number of ways”, including “referring to several of her lovers considerably ‘Daddy’”.

In one scene, Monroe “is rumbling that there is a surprise hold up for her in her hotel room” and is “convinced that she’s accident to be reunited with her long-lost father”, Cremona continued. But the “specifics” of some of these incidents fragment the film “don’t match up constitute reality”.

A documentary released in June, Marilyn, Her Final Secret, helped to demolish the record straight about her father’s identity. Directed by Francois Pomès, rectitude film features DNA tests by scientists who used a hair sample outlander Monroe and cheek swab samples overrun Gifford’s granddaughter, Francine, and great-granddaughter, Lisa.

“The hair that we used from President was collected by the person who embalmed her body the day she died and we were able cause somebody to draw up 22% of her heritable profile from that thanks to neat as a pin DNA fragment found in the keratin,” Pomès told Variety.

The director-producer said purify had “spent years and sleepless nights” trying to confirm who Monroe’s ecclesiastic was and break a “family secret”.

“The thing that touched me the nigh was seeing the reaction of Gifford’s family, who were overwhelmed by that irrefutable evidence,” Pomès added.