As J.I. Baker, author of "The Empty Glass," told Glamour, Marilyn Monroe thought Clark Gable, the star of movies like "Gone With the Wind" and "Run Silent, Run Deep" was her father. Allegedly, one of her mother's exes had a thin mustache just like Gable's —naturally, Monroe assumed the men were one and the same. "I used to always think of [Clark Gable] as my father. I pretended that he was my father," Monroe once explained, adding, "I never pretended anyone was my mother, I don't know why" (via YouTube). In 1961, long after the A-lister had grown out of these childhood imaginings, she and Gable co-starred (as love interests) in "The Misfits," which proved to be the final film for both of them. Gable passed away in 1960 before "The Misfits" hit theaters, and Monroe died in 1962. 

And as for the icon's real-life father? A DNA test from 2022 identified him as Charles Stanley Gifford, a foreman at the Los Angeles film processing company where her mother once worked. The actor had long suspected her absent father's identity — as is evidenced by photographs, the pair looked strikingly similar ... "Marilyn never met her father in person, though she attempted to contact him more than once," Marilyn Monroe historian Scott Fortner explained. However, Gifford refused to talk to his daughter even after she gained worldwide recognition.