The Curious Case of Merle Oberon
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Youthful, graceful, gorgeous, all in all, a golden-age Hollywood movie star of great beauty Merle Oberon ruled the screen and innumerable hearts at the time.
However, the story goes, she rose through the ranks of Hollywood detached from her true identity and kept a well-guarded secret that she took with her to the grave. Best-known for playing the lead in the classic Wuthering Heights and Oscar-nominated role in The Dark Angel, Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson was an Anglo-Indian born in Bombay in 1911 to a British father and Eurasian Mother. But in Hollywood, Oberon and her backers had made concerted efforts to hide her origins and passed her off as a white person throughout her life.
She spent her first 17 years of life in British India and eventually moved to Britain and then the United States to pursue her acting career.
A Hungarian-British film director, Sir Alexander Korda - who Oberon later married - gave Merle her first break as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). Publicists for Korda reportedly had to invent a background story to explain her race.
Tasmania became her birthplace as it was far aw7ay from the US and was considered British to the core at that time. Further, Oberon was passed off as an upper-class girl from Hobart, Tasmania who moved to India after her father died in a hunting accident.
As she bagged more Hollywood films, the charade became harder to maintain, she never gave a shot without makeup. Though it may be reasonable to believe that the lies about her race might’ve stemmed from Hollywood’s then-social climate and not self-hatred. It is nothing short of a tragedy the trauma Oberon endured for the sake of receiving equal treatment from her peers.
Later when the actress had long gone, her original birth certificate was made public in 2014 which revealed that her mother known to the public(Charlotte Selby) was really Oberon’s grandmother; the actress’s biological mother was Selby’s daughter Constance, who was only 12 years old when she had Oberon.
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