Zsa Zsa Gabor only realized her leg had been amputated 18 months after the surgery when she tried to sit up and saw it was missing.

Zsa Zsa Gabor, 95, told her ninth husband Prince Frederic von Anhalt: “There is something missing” as the horror dawned on her.

Nobody had been able to tell the screen legend for fear it would cause too much upset, the New York Post reported.

Zsa Zsa Gabor only realized her leg had been amputated 18 months after the surgery

Zsa Zsa Gabor was unable to make the discovery herself because one hand is paralyzed and the other is too short to reach.

She has been in declining health since a car crash in 2002 and an accident in 2010 when she fell out of bed whilst trying to answer the telephone.

In January last year she had her right leg amputated above the knee after doctors found an infection and antibiotics failed to cure it.

Zsa Zsa Gabor is now confined to her bed at her Los Angeles mansion.

Prince Frederic von Anhalt admitted that along with not telling her about her leg, she “doesn’t know she gets food through the tube”.

He said: “It will only upset her. She was so glamorous always, and she is so vain.”

He also confessed to not informing her of the death of her friend Phyllis Diller last month as: “I don’t want to give bad news to my wife.”

Hungarian-born Zsa Zsa Gabor became a sex symbol in the 1950s and was known for her pithy comments on her colorful love life.

She once said: “I am a marvellous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house.”

Frederic von Anhalt was recently appointed her temporary conservator after a court battle with her daughter Constance Francesca Hilton.