Merle Oberon, The Beloved Hollywood Star Whose Heritage Could Have Ended Her Career
Public DomainMerle Oberon in a 1935 issue of Spanish-language film magazine Cine Mundial.Merle Oberon was one of the leading Hollywood stars of the 1930s. She played heroines like Anne Boleyn and Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights, and she was even nominated for an Academy Award for her role in The Dark Ages (1935). But she had a secret that could have destroyed her career.Oberon was not born to white parents in Tasmania as she claimed. Her mother was from Sri Lanka, so Oberon had South Asian heritage. During a time of deep prejudice and guidelines that forbade the portrayal of mixed-race relationships onscreen, Oberon needed to pass as white if she wanted to make it as an actress.So, she bleached her skin, lied about her past, and rose through the ranks of Hollywood. It wasnt until after Oberons death that the truth about her ethnicity came out.Today, Merle Oberon isnt just remembered as a Golden Age star with an acting career that spanned 50 years. Unbeknownst at the time, she was also the first person of Asian descent ever nominated for an Oscar.The Early Life Of Merle OberonWhile the circumstances of Merle Oberons birth were revealed after her death in 1979, the true identity of her mother remains a subject of debate to this day. She was born Estelle Merle OBrien Thompson in Bombay, British India, in February 1911. Her father was Arthur Thompson, an engineer from Wales who was in India building railroads. Her mother was either Arthurs wife, Charlotte Selby, or Charlottes 14-year-old daughter, Constance. Charlotte and, in turn, Constance was a Burgher, an ethnic group made up of indigenous Sri Lankans who married European colonists. While Charlotte raised Merle as her own, theres a disturbing theory that the future actress was actually conceived when Arthur raped his teenage stepdaughter. Public DomainLeft to right: Actor David Niven, Merle Oberon, actress Norma Shearer, and producer Irving Thalberg in 1936.Arthur died while fighting in World War I when Merle was five, and the young girl and her mother or at least the woman she knew as her mother lived in poverty for several years. They later moved to Calcutta, where Merle began attending a private school as a charity student and faced constant teasing from European girls for her race.As a teenager, Merle Oberon began performing with a local theater group and started dating a former actor named Ben Finney. Finney broke up with Oberon when he discovered that her mother was Sri Lankan, but he agreed to introduce her to Rex Ingram, an Irish director and producer, if she would move to France.So, Oberon and her mother packed up and headed to Nice, where Ingram had left word of the hopeful actress at a local studio. It was enough to get her foot in the door. She was cast as an extra in The Three Passions and a star was born. The Rise Of A Hollywood LegendMerle Oberons breakout role came in 1933 when she was cast as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII. From there, she starred in The Battle, The Broken Melody, and The Scarlet Pimpernel alongside Leslie Howard one of her many lovers.Public DomainLeslie Howard and Merle Oberon began a romantic relationship while co-starring in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934).Audiences were drawn to Oberons stunning beauty, as her dark hair and eyes dazzled in black-and-white films. Of course, these features stemmed from her South Asian heritage. While they were a boon in many ways, they were also a hanging sword of Damocles.Oberon was terrified that her true parentage would come to light. When she moved to Europe with her mother (or grandmother), she reportedly introduced her as her servant.Merle Oberon told The West Australian in 1934, I was born in Tasmania but I left there when I was a child. I spent seven years in India and came to England four years ago.This deception was necessary if Oberon wanted to become a leading lady in the Golden Age of Hollywood. At the time, the Hays Code determined what could and could not be shown on the big screen in the United States.Extreme violence, homosexuality, and interracial romance were forbidden. If producers knew the truth about Oberons background, she couldnt be cast alongside white love interests. To help perpetuate her fictional identity, Oberon bleached her skin to appear even lighter in black and white. She continued landing the roles of canonically white women, such as Catherine Earnshaw in the 1939 adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Public DomainLaurence Olivier and Merle Oberon starred as Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights (1939). In 1935, she earned her one and only Academy Award nomination for her performance in The Dark Angel. She was historys first Asian Oscar nominee but nobody knew it at the time.Merle Oberons career did take a hit when black-and-white films declined in popularity. Her skin was obviously darker in color, and further attempts to bleach it resulted in damage to her complexion. She was still cast in plenty of films throughout the 1940s, but when full-color motion pictures started becoming the industry standard the following decade, her star began to decline. She continued to appear in movies sporadically in the 1960s before her final film, Interval, in 1973.All the while, Oberons ups and downs as an actress mirrored a turbulent personal life that was just as dramatic as her entertainment career.Merle Oberons Tumultuous Personal LifeMerle Oberon was married four times, though she had countless love affairs in between and even during these unions. Her first husband, British director and producer Alexander Korda, helped boost her career, but they divorced in 1945 after six years together. Indeed, her affair with John Wayne lasted longer than their marriage.The same year she divorced Korda, Oberon married cinematographer Lucien Ballard. He invented a camera light called the obie that would help hide Oberons facial scars from a serious car crash in 1937, but even this act of love couldnt save their relationship, which came to an end in 1949.John Verzi Collection/Los Angeles Public LibraryMerle Oberon at a gala in Los Angeles in 1962.It seemed as if Oberon might finally settle down when she married Bruno Pagliai in 1957. They adopted two children and stayed together for 15 years, but Oberon had affairs with much younger men, such as model Mike Edwards and actor Robert Wolders, during their relationship. They, too, divorced in 1973, and Oberon wed Wolders two years later. She was 64; he was 39.Its unclear how much Merle Oberons husbands knew about her true background, but she certainly spent her life hiding it from everyone else. According to a 2023 report in The Guardian, when her first husbands nephew, Michael Korda, tried to write a biography on her life, she threatened to sue him if he revealed anything she didnt approve. And when the truth almost came out during a trip to Australia in 1978, Oberon claimed she was ill and skipped out on a ceremony held in her honor.The following year, she had a stroke and died at age 68. The truth about Merle Oberons past only became clear after her death. Today, shes recognized as the first person of Asian descent to be nominated for an Academy Award but its an an honor she never would have acknowledged during her lifetime.After learning about the life and career of Merle Oberon, read about Sessue Hayakawa, the first Asian leading man in Hollywood. Then, go inside the story of Belle da Costa Green, the celebrated Black librarian who passed as white in New York high society.The post Merle Oberon, The Beloved Hollywood Star Whose Heritage Could Have Ended Her Career appeared first on All That's Interesting.
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