Merle Oberon
| Merle Oberon | |
|---|---|
1943
|
|
| Born |
Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson 19 February 1911 Mumbai, Maharashtra, India |
| Died | 23 November 1979 (aged 68) Malibu, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 1928-1973 |
| Spouse(s) |
Alexander Korda (1939–45) Lucien Ballard (1945–49) Bruno Pagliai (1957–73) (2 adopted children) Robert Wolders (1975–79) (her death) |
| Children | Francesca Pagliai Bruno Pagliai Jr. |
Merle Oberon (born Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson, 19 February 1911 – 23 November 1979) was an Anglo-Indian actress. She began her film career in British films as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). After her success in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), she travelled to the United States to make films for Samuel Goldwyn. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Dark Angel (1935). A traffic collision in 1937 caused facial injuries that could have ended her career, but she soon followed this with her most renowned performance in Wuthering Heights (1939).
Throughout her adult life, in order to conceal her Indian heritage she maintained the fiction that she was born in Tasmania, Australia; she concocted a story that all her school records had been destroyed in a fire, which meant it could be neither proven nor disproven. She maintained these fictions throughout her professional life. The year before she died she finally admitted this story was not true, and records located since her death have confirmed her true origin.
Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson was born in Bombay (now known as Mumbai), British India on 19 February 1911. Merle was given "Queenie" as a nickname, in honour of Queen Mary, who visited India along with King George V in 1911.
Over the years, Oberon obscured her parentage. Some sources claim Merle's parents to have been Arthur Terrence O'Brien Thompson, a British mechanical engineer from Darlington, who worked in Indian Railways, and Charlotte Selby, a Eurasian from Ceylon with partial Māori heritage. However, at the age of 14, Charlotte had in Ceylon given birth to her first child Constance, the result of a relationship with Henry Alfred Selby, an Irish foreman of a tea planter. Constance, age 12 at the time of Merle's birth, was actually Merle's biological mother. Despite this, Charlotte raised Merle as her own child and as Constance's sister. Charlotte's partner, Arthur Thompson, was listed as the father in Merle's birth certificate, with the forename misspelled as "Arther". Constance eventually married and had four other children, Edna, Douglas, Harry and Stanislaus (Stan) with her husband Alexander Soares. All the siblings reportedly believed Merle to be their aunt (the sister of their mother Constance), when in fact she was their half-sister. Edna and Douglas moved at an early age to the UK and Harry later in life moved to Toronto, Canada, and retained Constance's maiden name, Selby. Stanislaus was the only child to keep his father's last name of Soares; he has resided in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada.
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