Was impregnated by another big time actor and got an abortion.
Indeed she did...that actor was Gary Cooper, and it tormented her the rest of her life and turned her into a pro-life advocate. She is a hero in my book. From one obit:
"Despite all this, Neal’s abortion of her unborn child was the greatest sorrow of her life. For three years Neal carried on an affair with Gary Cooper, then 47 years old and married, in 1949 when she was 23. The pair, which played opposite each other in the film version of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead," discovered that Neal was pregnant.
Neal revealed in 1988 in her autobiography, “As I am”, that she succumbed to the pressure put on her by Cooper and believed that having a baby out of wedlock would end her time in Hollywood.
“If I had only one thing to do over in my life,” she wrote, “I would have that baby.”
Perhaps that was one underlying motivation for Neal’s public support of her fellow actress Ingrid Bergman, who gave birth to her own child out of wedlock in 1950, exposing her affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini. For that, Bergman was denounced as "Hollywood's apostle of degradation" by the U.S. Senate. Neal would later tell PEOPLE magazine in 1988 that she wished she had Bergman’s bravery to give birth to her own child, rather than succumb to the pressure to cover up the pregnancy and the affair.
Monsignor Jim Lisante, a longtime friend of Neal and Catholic priest of the Diocese of Rockville Center, NY, told the 2003 National Right to Life Committee’s Proudly Pro-Life Awards Dinner audience that the actress told him 20 years earlier that aborting her child was the greatest tragedy in her life.
"Father, alone in the night for over 40 years, I have cried for my child,” said Neal, according to Lisante. “And if there is one thing I wish I had the courage to do over in my life, I wish I had the courage to have that baby."
Lisante told the pro-life advocates gathered that evening that Neal would reach out many times to other women contemplating abortion saying, “Don't make my mistake. Let your baby live."
Lisante also said that Maria Cooper, daughter of Gary Cooper, became friends with Neal after she ended the affair and told the actress that it took her longer to forgive Neal for aborting her baby brother or sister, than for the adulterous affair with her father."