Merle Oberon, a leading Hollywood star of the black and white era, was born on this day in Mumbai, then Bombay.
She was born Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson. She was raised as the daughter of a British man, and Charlotte Shelby, a part-Sinhalese and part-Maori woman. Oberon hid her mixed race origin for most of her life. It also came to light later that Charlotte was actually her biological grandmother.
Oberon moved to Kolkata with Charlotte in 1917. She first performed with the Calcutta Amateur Dramatic Society. At Firpo’s in 1929, she is said to have met a colonel, on whose recommendation she reached Paris. From there, she reached England and caught the eye of director Alexander Korda, who cast her as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII and gave her the name Merle Oberon. Ironically her “exotic” looks from the mixed origin, which she would not admit to, opened the gates of Hollywood to her and she shot to meteoric fame.
She acted in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) with Leslie Howard, in Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier (1939), as George Sand in A Song to Remember (1945) and as the Empress Josephine in Désirée (1954).
A car accident in 1937 had caused her facial injuries, but she recovered and continued her career. In 1935, she won an Oscar nomination for her role in the film The Dark Angel.
A documentary titled The Trouble with Merle (2014) established that Charlotte was Oberon’s grandmother. Charlotte’s daughter Constance had Oberon when she was a teenager, but to avoid a scandal, Charlotte raised Constance and Oberon as sisters.