Judy Lewis, the secret daughter of two legends of the silver screen, has died at 76, reports The New York Times. Lewis, the daughter of Loretta Young and Clark Gable, spent her first 19 months of life hidden away, a deception created by Young to protect her growing movie career and the image of Gable, who was married to someone else when Lewis was conceived, the story says.

Young and Gable were shooting the 1935 film "The Call of the Wild" when they became off-screen as well as on-screen lovers, the piece adds. Young was 22 and unmarried, while Gable was 34 and married to Maria Langham.

After Lewis was born on Nov. 6, 1935, she was handed over to caretakers and an orphanage so that Young could continue her career, according to the story. Young brought her home when the child was 19 months old, telling the world she had adopted the girl.

Lewis grew up confused about her relationship to her mother, and teased about her ears, which stuck out like Gable’s, the story says. She had her ears surgically altered when she was 7.

As an adult, she confronted her mother about her parentage, but Young never talked publicly about it, the story says. Her authorized biography, "Forever Young," acknowledged the facts but on the condition that it would be published after her death, the piece adds. She died in 2000.

Lewis herself went into acting, with a regular role on the soap opera "The Secret Storm" from 1964 to 1971, and produced TV shows and appeared in Broadway plays, the article says. In her mid-40s she returned to school, and she became a licensed family and child counselor in 1992, the piece adds.

Judy Lewis