Merle Oberon (19 February 1911 – 23 November 1979), born Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson, was an Academy Award-nominated British film actress.
Oberon was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), British India. Until fairly recently, her parentage has remained deliberately obscure. Merle's mother was Anglo-Sri Lankan Constance Selby; her father is unknown. Constance's mother Charlotte Selby took the child immediately and raised Merle as her own, never revealing her true parentage to anyone. Charlotte's partner Arthur Thompson, a British army officer stationed in India, became Merle's putative father, and Charlotte her mother. Merle knew Constance only as her "sister."
In 1914, when Merle was three, Arthur Thompson died of pneumonia on the Western Front in the early months of World War I. Merle, with her "mother," led an impoverished existence in shabby Bombay apartments for a few years. Then, in 1917, they moved to better circumstances in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Oberon received a foundation scholarship to attend La Martiniere College for Girls, a well-known Calcutta private school. There, she was constantly taunted for her unconventional parentage and eventually quit school and had her lessons at home.
Oberon first performed with the Calcutta Amateur Dramatic Society. She was also completely enamored of the movies and enjoyed going out to nightclubs. As she entered her teen years, she dated increasingly older, urbane men.
In 1929, she met a former actor who claimed he could introduce her to Rex Ingram of Victorine Studios. Oberon jumped at the offer and decided to follow the man to the studios in France. However, when he saw Oberon's dark mother one night at her apartment and realized Oberon was mixed-race, he secretly decided to end the relationship. After packing all their belongings and moving to France, Oberon and her mother found that their supposed benefactor had dodged them. However, he had left a good word for Oberon with Rex Ingram at the studios in Nice. Ingram liked Oberon's exotic appearance. She was quickly hired to be an extra in a party scene.
Oberon arrived in England for the first time in 1928. Initially she worked as a club hostess under the name Queenie O'Brien and played in minor and unbilled roles in various films. "I couldn't dance or sing or write or paint. The only possible opening seemed to be in some line in which I could use my face. This was, in fact, no better than a hundred other faces, but it did possess a fortunately photogenic quality," she modestly told a journalist at Film Weekly in 1939.
Her film career received a major boost when the director Alexander Korda took an interest and gave her a small but prominent role, under the name Merle Oberon, as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) opposite Charles Laughton. The film became a major success and she was then given leading roles, such as Lady Blakeney in the The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) with Leslie Howard, who became her lover for a while. During her time as a film star, Oberon went to great lengths to disguise her mixed-race background and when her dark-skinned mother moved in with her, she masqueraded as Oberon's maid.
Oberon's career went on to greater heights, partly as a result of her relationship with and later marriage to Alexander Korda, who had persuaded her to take the name under which she became famous. He sold "shares" of her contract to producer Samuel Goldwyn, who gave her good vehicles in Hollywood. Her mother stayed behind in England. Oberon received her only Oscar nomination as Best Actress for The Dark Angel (1935) produced by Goldwyn. Around this time she had a serious romance with David Niven, and according to his authorized biography, even wanted to marry him, but he wasn't faithful to her. She was selected to star in Korda's film I, Claudius (1937) as Messalina, but a serious car accident resulted in filming being abandoned. Oberon was scarred for life, but skilled lighting technicians were able to hide her injuries from cinema audiences.
She went on to appear as Cathy in her most famous film Wuthering Heights (1939), as George Sand in A Song to Remember (1945), and as Empress Josephine in Désirée (1954).
According to Princess Merle, the biography written by Charles Higham with Roy Moseley, Oberon suffered even further damage to her complexion in 1940 from a combination of cosmetic poisoning and an allergic reaction to sulfa drugs. Alexander Korda sent her to a skin specialist in New York City, where she underwent several dermabrasion procedures. The results, however, were only partially successful; without makeup, one could see noticeable pitting and indentation of her skin.
Her mother died in 1937, and in 1949 Oberon commissioned paintings of her mother from an old photograph, instructing the artist to lighten her mother's complexion. The paintings would hang in all her homes until her death in 1979. Also, Oberon supposedly had a minor obsession with facial injuries after her own accident, and had an affair with Richard Hillary who had been burned after his Supermarine Spitfire was shot down in 1940.
Merle Oberon became Lady Korda upon her husband's knighthood. She divorced Sir Alexander Korda in 1945, to marry cinematographer Lucien Ballard. Ballard devised a special camera light for her to eliminate her facial scars on film. The light became known as the "Obie".
She married twice more, to Italian-born industrialist, Bruno Pagliai (with whom she adopted two children) and Dutch actor Robert Wolders – who would later become Audrey Hepburn's companion – before her retirement in Malibu, California, where she died after suffering a stroke at the age of 68. She was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
Merle Oberon has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to Motion Pictures, at 6250 Hollywood Boulevard.
Throughout her professional life, in order to deny her mixed-race Indian background, Oberon maintained the fiction that she had been born and raised in St. Helens, a beachside resort on the East coast of Tasmania, Australia. That there were no birth or school records that could prove this, was explained by another fabrication, that they had all been burnt in a fire. The story of her alleged Tasmanian connections was comprehensively debunked after her death.
She is only known to have been to Australia once, when she agreed to visit Hobart for a homecoming reception in 1978, the year before her death. However, shortly after arriving at the reception she excused herself, claiming illness. Many people who might have been in a position to confirm or disprove her Tasmanian connection were denied the opportunity to meet her and question her. She was not seen elsewhere in public during her Australian visit. Yet there are still many people in Tasmania who claim to have known Oberon as a child. However the Hobart-born actor Errol Flynn was unconvinced, and he publicly chided Oberon.
Michael Korda, nephew of Alexander Korda, wrote a roman à clef about Oberon after her death entitled Queenie. This was also turned into a television miniseries starring Mia Sara. In 2002, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation produced a documentary entitled The Trouble with Merle, directed by Maree Delofski, investigating the conflicting versions of her origin.
