Profile of Merle Oberon on Famous Like Me

Merle Oberon (February 19, 1911 – November 23, 1979), born Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson, was a film actress, known for her sultry looks.

Born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India to an Anglo-Irish father and an Anglo-Sinhalese mother, Constance Selby, who gave birth to Merle at the age of 15 and allowed her to be raised as her sister, Merle came to 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. Her first major film role was as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) opposite Charles Laughton. In 1934, she played the female lead in The Scarlet Pimpernel, opposite Leslie Howard.

Oberon's career went on to greater heights partly as a result of her relationship with and later marriage to director Alexander Korda, who had persuaded her to take the name under which she became famous. She received her only Academy Award for Best Actress nomination for The Dark Angel (1935). She was to star in Korda's film of I, Claudius (1937) as Messalina, but a serious car accident resulted in filming being abandoned. Merle Oberon was scarred for life, but skilled lighting technicians prevented her injuries being spotted by cinema audiences. She went on to appear as Cathy in Wuthering Heights (1939), as George Sand in A Song to Remember (1945), and as Empress Josephine in Désirée (1954). 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 in Hollywood, she masqueraded as Oberon's maid.

Merle Oberon divorced Sir Alexander Korda in 1945, to marry cinematographer Lucien Ballard. She married twice more, to Italian-born industrialist, Bruno Pagliai (with whom she adopted 2 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.

She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to Motion Pictures, at 6250 Hollywood Boulevard.

Throughout her professional life, Oberon denied her Indian background but maintained the fiction that she had been born and raised in Australia, specifically in Tasmania. 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. She is only known to have been to Australia once, when she agreed to visit Tasmania towards the end of her life. However, she was not seen in public, and she became ill shortly before attending a reception in her honour in Hobart; those who might have been in a position to confirm or disprove her Tasmanian connection were denied the opportunity to meet her and question her. The story of her alleged Tasmanian connections was comprehensively debunked after her death. It was shown to have been created to disguise her mixed-race Indian background. Yet there are still many people in Tasmania who claim to have known her as a child, and will apparently not be convinced otherwise.

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