MERLE OBERON

'Merle Oberon' (February 19, 1911 – November 23, 1979), born 'Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson', was an Academy Award-nominated British film actress.

Contents

Early life

Film career

Filmography

Features

Short Subjects

Biographies

External links

Early life

Oberon was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), British India. Her mother, Charlotte, was an Anglo-Sinhalese nurse; her father, Arthur, was a British railway engineer. Merle was her mother's second child. Charlotte had abandoned her first daughter, Constance, and refused to take care of another child born out of wedlock. She insisted that Arthur marry her, although there is no evidence that he actually did.
In 1914, when she was 3, Merle's father died of pneumonia on the Western Front in the early months of World War I. Mother and daughter led an impoverished existence in shabby Bombay apartments for a few years. Then, in 1917, they moved to better circumstances in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Merle 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.
Merle 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. Merle jumped at the offer and decided to follow the man to the studios in France. However, when he saw Merle's dark mother one night at her apartment and realized Merle was mixed-race, he secretly decided to end the relationship. After packing all their belongings and moving to France, Merle and her mother found that their supposed benefactor had dodged them. However, he had left a good word for Merle with Rex Ingram at the studios in Nice. Ingram liked Merle's exotic appearance. She was quickly hired to be an extra in a party scene.

Film career

Merle 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. 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 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 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. Merle 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, Merle 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 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, in order to deny her mixed-race Indian background, Oberon maintained the fiction that she had been born and raised in 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. 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, yet there are still many people in Tasmania who claim to have known her as a child, and will apparently not be convinced otherwise. Unconvinced, however, was Warner Brothers megastar Errol Flynn, a real Tasmanian, who publicly chided Oberon.
After her death, Michael Korda, nephew of Alexander Korda wrote a roman à clef about Oberon entitled ''Queenie''. This was also turned into a television miniseries starring Mia Sara.

Filmography

Features

★ ''The Three Passions'' (1928)

★ ''A Warm Corner'' (1930)

★ ''Alf's Button'' (1930)

★ ''Never Trouble Trouble'' (1931)

★ ''The W Plan'' (1931)

★ ''Fascination'' (1931)

★ ''For the Love of Mike'' (1932)

★ ''Reserved for Ladies'' (1932)

★ ''Ebb Tide'' (1932)

★ ''Aren't We All?'' (1932)

★ ''Wedding Rehearsal'' (1932)

★ ''Men of Tomorrow'' (1932)

★ ''Strange Evidence'' (1933)

★ ''The Private Life of Henry VIII'' (1933)

★ ''The Battle'' (1934)

★ ''The Private Life of Don Juan'' (1934)

★ ''The Broken Melody'' (1934)

★ ''The Scarlet Pimpernel'' (1934)

★ ''Folies Bergère'' (1935)

★ ''The Dark Angel'' (1935)

★ ''These Three'' (1936)

★ ''Beloved Enemy'' (1936)

★ ''I, Claudius'' (1937) (unfinished)

★ ''The Divorce of Lady X'' (1938)

★ ''The Cowboy and the Lady'' (1938)

★ ''Wuthering Heights'' (1939)

★ ''Over the Moon'' (1939)

★ ''The Lion Has Wings'' (1939)

★ ''Til We Meet Again'' (1940)

★ ''That Uncertain Feeling'' (1941)

★ ''Affectionately Yours'' (1941)

★ ''Lydia'' (1941)

★ ''Forever and a Day'' (1943)

★ ''Stage Door Canteen'' (1943)

★ ''First Comes Courage'' (1943)

★ ''The Lodger'' (1944)

★ ''Dark Waters'' (1944)

★ ''A Song to Remember'' (1945)

★ ''This Love of Ours'' (1945)

★ ''A Night in Paradise'' (1946)

★ ''Temptation'' (1946)

★ ''Night Song'' (1948)

★ ''Berlin Express'' (1948)

★ ''24 Hours of a Woman's Life'' (1952)

★ ''Pardon My French'' (1952) (French version was also filmed)

★ ''All Is Possible in Granada'' (1954)

★ ''Desirée'' (1954)

★ ''Deep in My Heart'' (1954)

★ ''The Price of Fear'' (1956)

★ ''Of Love and Desire'' (1963)

★ ''The Oscar'' (1966)

★ ''Hotel'' (1967)

★ ''Interval'' (1973)

Short Subjects

★ ''Screen Snapshots Series 16, No. 4'' (1936)

★ ''Hollywood Goes to Town'' (1938)

Biographies

★ Higham, Charles and Moseley, Roy – ''Princess Merle: The Romantic Life of Merle Oberon'' ISBN 0698112318 Pub: Coward-McCann, New York (1983)

External links

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★ "The Trouble With Merle" (Australian documentary)

★ "Merle Oberon website"

★ Positive Astrology - Astrological charts and biographical details of Merle's many affairs