|
|
|
|
| Birth Name(s) : Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson |
Date of Birth: N/A |
| Status:
Single
|
Partner:
Alexander Korda (1939-1945) |
| Profession:
N/A |
| << Add Merle Oberon To Your Favorites |
|
Full Merle Oberon Biography
Merle Oberon (February 19, 1911 – November 23, 1979), born Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson, was an Academy Award-nominated British film actress.
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.
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.
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 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 St. Helens, a beachside resort on the East coast of 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. The story of her alleged Tasmanian connections was comprehensively debunked after her death.
She is only known to have been to Australia once, when she agreed to visit Hobart for a homecoming reception in 1978, the year before her death. However, shortly after arriving at the reception she excused herself, claiming illness. Many people who might have been in a position to confirm or disprove her Tasmanian connection were denied the opportunity to meet her and question her. She was not seen elsewhere in public during her Tasmanian visit.
Yet there are still many people in Tasmania who claim to have known Oberon as a child. Unconvinced, however, was the Hobart-born actor Errol Flynn, 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.
In 2002, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation produced a documentary entitled The Trouble with Merle, directed by David Noakes, investigating the conflicting versions of her origin. |
|
|
| Add Merle Oberon Biography (SuperUSERS) + |
| Add Merle Oberon Review/Comment
|
HQ Merle Oberon Pictures (1) | Random Merle Oberon Picture
|
| << Back to the Merle Oberon Homepage |
|
