Marilyn Monroe spent her whole life in the public eye, but new images indicate that, only two years before she passed away, she may have been secretly pregnant.

Previously unseen images of the sexy bombshell with a rounded tummy from July 8, 1960, recently surfaced online.

According to Tony Michaels, the pictures’ owner, the Hollywood star was actually expecting a child at the time, and Italian-French actor Yves Montand, not her third husband Arthur Miller, was the biological father.

According to Mail Online, Frieda Hull, a close friend of Marilyn’s and a photographer, took the images in New York and kept them a secret until her passing in June 2014.

The photos plainly show a noticeable protrusion coming from Monroe’s belly, which Hull claimed was proof the actress was pregnant.

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According to DailyMail.com, Monroe’s then-husband, writer Arthur Miller, was not the intended father; instead, it was Italian-French actor Yves Montand, with whom she had a highly public liaison after meeting him on the filming of the movie Let’s Make Love.

Later on, Montand came clean about the relationship. ‘I was crazy about my wife, but what can you do?’ Montand recalled with a very French shrug.

Despite having financial difficulties, Hull retained them till her death and refused to sell them.

“Frieda was very proud of those slides and she was very proud to keep them a secret until the day she died. But she told me the story behind them, that Marilyn got pregnant by Yves Montand,” Michaels told Mail Online.

“It wasn’t a guess or a presumption, it was something she knew for sure, she was very close to Marilyn,” he added.

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The images were put on exhibit for the general public after Julien’s Auctions sold them together with other Hull items. Tony Michaels, a friend of hers, bought them. He claimed to have known about these photos for a long time and wanted to purchase them, but Hull turned down the offers in order to protect her friend’s privacy as an actor.

The pictures were taken around the time of the Yves Montand and Marilyn Monroe co-starring movie Let’s Make Love.

“It wasn’t a guess or a presumption, it was something she [Frieda] knew for sure, she was very close to Marilyn.,” Michaels says. According to her, Monroe eventually lost the child. Before that, she had three miscarriages, which the doctors said was due to endometriosis.

Tony asserts that he has done extensive study into the time frame Frieda said Monroe was pregnant, and that images captured at the time demonstrate the child’s growth between two of her films.

‘Let’s Make Love, you can see towards the end that she could be pregnant and she went right in to the The Misfits, Arthur Miller’s play that he wrote for her,’ he says.

‘Then right at the end of The Misfits there’s no sign of a pregnancy.’

According to Tony, Frieda thought Marilyn’s ten-day hospital stay while filming The Misfits wasn’t for extreme tiredness as initially reported, but rather for a psychological breakdown and potentially a miscarriage.

‘She just told me Marilyn was pregnant in those photos and I believed her. I don’t think she’d tell me that on a hunch, she knew.

‘Frieda believed that it wasn’t exhaustion that landed her in hospital, she said it was a nervous breakdown and she lost her baby.

‘And all she told me was that Marilyn has lost the baby, it was never made clear whether that was by way of a miscarriage or even an abortion, and I never thought to press her on it.’

According to Tony, he purchased the images since no one else was aware of their history as “The pregnant slides.”

‘Now I think that the story needs to be told,’ he added.