Merle Oberon (born Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson; 19 February 191123 November 1979) was a British actress of Sri Lankan Burgher origin. Her career spanned the 1920s to the 1970s, and she was a major leading lady during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Born and raised in British India, she began her acting career in British cinema in the early 1930s, with a breakout role in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). She later moved to Hollywood, where she became an international star, earning acclaim for films such as The Dark Angel (1935), Wuthering Heights (1939), and That Uncertain Feeling (1941). Her performance as Kitty Vane in The Dark Angel earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Oberon's other notable roles included A Song to Remember (1945), Berlin Express (1948), and Désirée (1954). A traffic collision in 1937 caused facial injuries that nearly ended her career, but she recovered and remained active in film and television until 1973.
Throughout her adult life, Oberon concealed her parentage and ethnic background, claiming to have been born in Australia to white British parents. Despite hiding her Asian heritage throughout her career, Oberon is regarded as the first Asian nominee in the Best Actress category and the first Asian individual overall to receive an Oscar nomination.
Early life Estelle Merle O'Brien ThompsonHigham and Moseley 1983, p. 24."£5,000 Damages for Merle Oberon." The Glasgow Herald, 5 May 1938. Retrieved 5 January 2016. was born in Bombay, British India, on 19 February 1911, to a white father and a Burgher mother. She was given the nickname "Queenie" in honour of Queen Mary, who visited India along with King George V in 1911.Higham and Moseley 1983, p. 25.
Parentage For most of her life, Oberon concealed the truth about her parentage by claiming that she had been born in Tasmania, Australia, to white parents, and that her birth records had been destroyed in a fire. She identified as British.
She was raised as the daughter of Arthur Terrence O'Brien Thompson, a Welsh mechanical engineer from Darlington who worked in Indian Railways,Higham and Moseley 1983, p. 21. and his wife, Charlotte Selby, whose full married name, according to her 1937 obituary, was Constance Charlotte Thompson. Selby was born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and was a Burgher (a small Eurasian ethnic group in Sri Lanka).
Oberon's birth certificate lists her biological mother as "Constance Thompson", which could have referred to either Constance Charlotte Selby or her then-14-year-old daughter, Constance Joyce Selby. It is theorized that Thompson impregnated his stepdaughter Constance Joyce by rape, with Oberon being raised as Constance Joyce's half-sister to avoid scandal. Neither Constance Charlotte nor Constance Joyce acknowledged this theory during their lifetimes, and DNA testing did not exist then to determine maternity.
Constance Charlotte herself had given birth to Constance Joyce at the age of 14, after being raped by Henry Alfred Selby, the Anglo-Irish foreman of a tea plantation. In their 1983 biography of Oberon, Charles Higham and Roy Moseley (known to write highly fictionalised accounts of celebrities) also averred, dubiously, that Constance Charlotte had Māori ancestry, though which Iwi (Maori tribe) was not specified.Higham and Moseley 1983, 17-18.
Constance Joyce married Alexander Soares, with whom she had four children: Edna, Douglas, Harry, and Stanislaus. Edna and Douglas moved to the UK at an early age. Stanislaus, who lived in Surrey, Canada, was the only child to retain his father's surname of Soares. Harry eventually moved to Toronto, Canada, retaining grandmother Charlotte's maiden name, Selby.
After locating Oberon's birth certificate in Indian government records in Bombay, Harry tried to visit her in Los Angeles, only for Oberon to refuse any meeting. When Higham and Moseley were working on their biography of Oberon, Harry withheld that he might have been Oberon's half-brother instead of her nephew; he later disclosed the information to Maree Delofski, producer of the 2002 ABC documentary The Trouble with Merle, which investigated the conflicting versions of Oberon's origin, and repeated it to biographer Mayukh Sen, who included it in the book Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star (2025).
Youth In 1914, when Merle was three, her father, Arthur Thompson, joined the British Army and later died of pneumonia on the Western Front during the Battle of the Somme.Higham and 1983, pp. 25–26. Merle and Charlotte led an impoverished existence in shabby flats in Bombay for a few years before moving in 1917 to Calcutta.Higham and Moseley 1983, p. 28. Oberon attended La Martinière Calcutta for Girls, one of the best private schools in Calcutta, as a charity student.Woollacott, 2011, P97 There, she was constantly teased by the majority European students for her mixed ethnicity, which led her to quit school and receive lessons at home.Higham and Moseley 1983, p. 30.
Oberon performed with the Calcutta Amateur Dramatic Society. She loved films; she liked going to nightclubs. Indian journalist Sunanda K. Datta-Ray said that Merle worked as a telephone operator in Calcutta under the name Queenie Thomson, and won a contest at Firpo's Restaurant there, before the outset of her film career.Datta-Ray, Sunanda K. "More than skin-deep." Business Standard, New Delhi, 4 July 2009. Retrieved 16 July 2009.
At Firpo's in 1929, aged 18, Oberon met a former actor, Colonel Ben Finney, and dated him;Higham and Moseley 1983, pp. 33–34. however, when he saw Charlotte one night at her flat, he realized Oberon was of mixed ancestry and ended the relationship. However, Finney promised to introduce her to Rex Ingram of Victorine Studios (whom he had known through his relationship with the late Barbara La Marr), if she were prepared to travel to France, which she readily did. After packing all their belongings and moving to France, Oberon and her mother found that their supposed benefactor avoided them,Higham and Moseley 1983, p. 37. although he had left a good word for Oberon with Ingram at the studios in Nice. Ingram appreciated Oberon's exotic appearance and quickly hired her to be an extra in a party scene in a film named The Three Passions.Higham and Moseley 1983, p. 38.
Acting career
Early roles Oberon arrived in England for the first time in 1928, aged 17. She worked as a club hostess under the name Queenie O'Brien and played in minor and unbilled roles in various films. "I couldn't dance or sing or write or paint. The only possible opening seemed to be in some line in which I could use my face. This was, in fact, no better than a hundred other faces, but it did possess a fortunately photogenic quality," she told a journalist at Film Weekly in 1939.Film Weekly, May 1939, p. 7.
Alexander Korda and British stardom Her film career received a major boost when 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 in other productions, starting with The Battle (1934) opposite Charles Boyer, and The Broken Melody (1934).
Oberon then made two more films for Korda: The Private Life of Don Juan (1934) with Douglas Fairbanks was a disappointment but The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) with Leslie Howard, who became her lover for a while, was a huge hit.Higham and Mosley 1983, P. 94.
Hollywood and Sam Goldwyn Oberon's career benefited from her relationship with, and later marriage to, Korda. He sold "shares" of her contract to producer Samuel Goldwyn and she moved to Hollywood. Her "mother" stayed behind in England. Oberon's career there began with Folies Bergère de Paris (1935) starring Maurice Chevalier.
Goldwyn put her in The Dark Angel (1935), which earned her a sole Academy Award for Best Actress nomination, then These Three (1936) for William Wyler and Beloved Enemy (1936). The latter co-starred David Niven, with whom Oberon had a serious romance. According to one biographer, she even wanted to marry him, but he was not faithful to her.Munn 2010, p. 70.
She was selected to star in Korda's 1937 film, I, Claudius, as Messalina, but her injuries in a car crash resulted in the film being abandoned.Graham, Sheilah. "Hollywood gadabout." Milwaukee Journal, 4 April 1937. Retrieved 5 January 2016. While in England she co-starred with Laurence Olivier in the Korda comedy The Divorce of Lady X (1938).
Back in Hollywood, Oberon appeared opposite Gary Cooper in The Cowboy and the Lady (1938) and then played Cathy in the highly acclaimed film Wuthering Heights (1939) opposite Laurence Olivier. In England, Oberon made Over the Moon (1939) and The Lion Has Wings (1939) for Korda.
Oberon had darker skin, due to her Sri Lankan background. This was not too much a problem in black-and-white film, but she did not "test well" during colour film tests. According to Princess Merle, the biography written by Charles Higham with Roy Moseley, Oberon suffered damage to her complexion in 1940 from a combination of cosmetic poisoning and an allergic reaction to sulfa drugs in an attempt to lighten her skin. Alexander Korda sent her to a skin specialist in New York City, where she underwent several dermabrasion procedures.Higham and Moseley 1983. The results were only partially successful; her face had become noticeably pitted and indented unless concealed by makeup.
Oberon starred in Til We Meet Again (1940) and Affectionately Yours (1941) for Warner Bros, then That Uncertain Feeling (1941) for Ernst Lubitsch. Korda financed Lydia (1941). None of these films was particularly successful at the box office. Oberon was one of many stars to make cameos in Forever and a Day (1943) and Stage Door Canteen (1943). She made First Comes Courage (1943) at Columbia and played the female lead in The Lodger (1944), a popular noir. Also admired was Dark Waters (1944).
Oberon had a big hit with A Song to Remember (1945), in which she played the French writer George Sand. However, this was followed by a series of unsuccessful films at Universal: This Love of Ours (1946), Night in Paradise (1946), and Temptation (1946). She made some films for RKO, Night Song (1948), and Berlin Express (1948).
Later career In France, Oberon appeared in Pardon My French (1951), then 24 Hours of a Woman's Life (1952) in England and All Is Possible in Granada (1954). Back in Hollywood she played the Empress Joséphine in Désirée (1954) and had a cameo role in Deep in My Heart (1954). She had the lead in a noir, The Price of Fear (1956). Oberon came out of retirement sporadically to appear in films such as Of Love and Desire (1963) and Hotel (1967). Her last movie was Interval (1973).
Personal life and death
Charlotte Selby, Oberon’s possible birth grandmother, raised Oberon as her daughter until her death in 1937. In 1949, Oberon commissioned paintings of Charlotte based on an old photograph (but depicting Charlotte with lighter skin),Kahn, Salma. "Hollywood's first Indian actress: Merle Oberon." SAPNA Magazine, Winter 2009. Retrieved 5 January 2016. which hung in all her homes until Oberon's own death in 1979.Higham and Moseley 1983, p. 100.
Relationships and marriages Oberon married director Alexander Korda in 1939. While married, she had a brief affair in 1941 with Richard Hillary, an RAF fighter pilot who had been badly burned in the Battle of Britain. They met while he was on a goodwill tour of the United States. He later wrote the best-selling autobiography The Last Enemy.