Shocking Secrets Patty Duke Took To Her Grave

#1 The Miracle Worker

Actress Patty Duke passed away in March of 2016 at the age of 69. A true star of stage, screen, and television, Patty won an Oscar after taking her Broadway role in the Helen Keller bio "The Miracle Worker" to Hollywood, which she performed at the age of just 12. She became the youngest Oscar winner at the time when that same role won the 16-year-old an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1962. It was that award that left fans clamouring for more of Patty Duke, which led to a sitcom in 1963 where she played 'identical cousins' on The Patty Duke Show. She had been secretly suffering with mental health issues since her early youth.

#2 A Difficult Childhood

Patty had to survive an early stardom filled with wild spending sprees, sexual promiscuity, multiple suicide attempts and crazed screaming fits. She also suffered from paranoid delusions, all during a time when Hollywood studios had no real understanding of mental illness.

Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother suffered from clinical depression and was prone to violence. When Duke was six, her mother forced her father to leave the family home. When Duke was eight, her care was turned over to talent managers John and Ethel Ross, who, after promoting Patty's brother, were looking for a girl to add to their stable of child actors. The managers raised Patty and forced her to work, claiming that they could not handle her and she was only "normal" when she was pretending to be someone else.

#3 Valley Of The Dolls

It somehow seemed ironic when she was offered the lead role in the 1967 film "Valley of the Dolls", where she played a woman caught up in the Hollywood drug culture who later credited the psychiatric drug Lithium for turning her life around. Patty herself finally began taking the same medication after she had been diagnosed with manic-depressive illness in 1982.

#4 Her Son Sean Was Born

Her personal life had remained one of Hollywoods most turbulent tales, full of more twists and turns than any script she had ever read from. Patty was pregnant with her son Sean, who found stardom in the "Lords of the Rings" films when she married Michael Tell in 1970. She was unmarried and had given birth to a child in a city full of celebrity gossip, but married very quickly after they'd met when Tell came to sublet her apartment. The marriage only lasted 13 days, and Patty insisted that the union was never consummated. She later reported that she believed Tell was gay and they had married to cover up his sexuality and to keep reporters from demanding to know who Seans father was.

#5 John Astin Claimed As Seans Father

Of course, the gossips and tabloid papers soon realized that Sean was born out of wedlock, and the rumors began to surface. Hollywood whispers said that Desi Arnaz, Jr. was really Sean's father, but Patty would later insist in her 1987 autobiography that Sean's real dad was "Addams Family" star John Astin, whom she had married in 1972. John would later adopt Sean, and the couple had more children together. Years later, however, DNA tests would prove that Michael Tell was Sean's real father, proving that they had indeed consummated their marriage in 1970.

#6 He Had Four Dads

Just like a typical Hollywood sitcom, Sean Astin would later bond with his rumored father, Desi Arnaz, Jr., which only added new fuel to the rumors. Sean also became close with his mother's next husband after John as well, stating "I can call any of them on the phone anytime I want to," said Sean. "John, Desi, Mike or Papa Mike my four dads!"

#7 Ten Years Too Long

John and Patty stayed married for ten years, which at the time was very long in Hollywood circles. Patty suddenly threw the Addams Family star out of the family home after he demanded she give up her career and become a housewife full time. At this point, the couple had five children, including three from John's previous marriage. Patty told reporters she stayed married for way too long to a man who held her back professionally.

#8 John Astin Wanted Her Back

Patty loved all of the children but felt that she was missing out on a career that was all she ever knew, acting. She began accepting offers for various small film and television projects, to the dismay of Astin. John was devastated by the split, and one family friend reported at the time to tabloids that "He's very much in love with Patty, and praying the separation will save their marriage from ending in divorce court."

#9 John Prayed For A Buddhist Wife

But the separation did not bring them closer, and the couple soon divorced. After his shattering divorce from Patty, it was discovered that John was regularly kneeling at a shrine in his home and chanting for a new wife who would share his Buddhist faith and his belief in reincarnation. When he would begin to slip into a depression he would call his best friend, Patrick Duffy of 'Dallas' fame, to come and chant with him at the shrine he had built.

#10 She Split Up A Married Couple

Wedded bliss was waiting for Patty in 1986, but the biggest scoop was not of her wedding but on how Patty broke up a marriage while romancing Army Drill Sgt. Michael Ray Pearce! "I don't feel that I took Mike from his wife and children," insisted Patty. "If the marriage had been a good one, no woman could have taken him away," she said.

#11 They Met While Filming A TV Movie

The Oscar-winning actress met Pearce when she went to Fort Benning, Ga. to film the TV movie "A Time to Triumph." The Army assigned Sgt. Pearce to teach Patty about military life so she would be believable in her role as a female Army helicopter pilot. After Patty came into his life, Pearce told Debra, his wife of 11 years, that he wanted to separate, said a close friend of the family.

#12 She Struggled With Mental Illness Throughout Her Life

Patty remained quirky all her life, and even enlisted the gossip magazine, The ENQUIRER to help her sell her beloved Idaho home and ranch through their eBay internet site in 2004. Patty decided to sell her home as an incentive to go along with a software company that her nephew Mike Kennedy has put on the market, the tabloid reported. "Once you've played your twin cousin and a blind, deaf and mute girl who learns to communicate," Patty told The ENQUIRER, "nothing sounds outlandish!" She was also known to go out to bars on her own in costumes and pretend to be someone else and meet strange men and women for one-night stands. It was later revealed in one of her two books, Call Me Anna, and Brilliant Madness: Living with Manic Depressive Illness, that she did not recall most of the quirky things she was accused of doing.

#13 Secret Bypass Surgery

In 2005 Patty, only 58 years old at the time, underwent a lifesaving secret bypass operation to clear an artery in her heart. Patty, who married Pearce in 1986 and stayed with him until her death, blamed her heart disease on a 40-year smoking habit. The stricken actress struggled to quit smoking and regain her health after her surgery. "I don't have the solution," she said. "It is the most difficult thing I have ever done!"

#14 She Became Ordained To Marry Gay Couples

Within a year she was back on her feet and eager to work again. She began accepting roles, and starred in several projects, including a posthumous role in the upcoming Christian film "Power in the Air." However, it was while recovering that the troubled actress found her true passion, marrying gay couples. In 2014 Patty had become an ordained minister, declaring: "I want to marry all the gay couples in our country!" Patty, who had recently played the partner of newly-out real-life lesbian Meredith Baxter in an episode of "Glee" (pictured), started a website for gay partners who wanted to be married and recruited the couples through the website so she could travel to them without cost, and perform a ceremony.

#15 Poor Mental And Physical Health Took Its Toll

Patty's busy schedule was taking a toll on her health once more, and she began showing signs of her mania and bipolar disorder. She had been hospitalized earlier in the year after experiencing stomach pains while at a screening of her 1962 film "The Miracle Worker" in Omaha, Neb. She was treated for irritable bowel syndrome and released two days later though she eventually slipped into a state of unrelated dementia that she never recovered from. Sadly, Patty had found her new mission in life while she was in her sad final days.