Merle Oberon (February 19, 1911 – November 23, 1979), born Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson, was a film actress.

Oberon was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), 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.

In 1929, she met a former actor who claimed he could introduce her to Rex Ingram of Victorine Studios. Merle jumped at the offer and decided to follow the man to the studios in France. However, when he saw Merle's dark mother one night at her apartment and realized Merle was mixed-race, he secretly decided to end the relationship. After packing all their belongings and moving to France, Merle and her mother found that their supposed benefactor had dodged them. However, he had left a good word for Merle with Rex Ingram at the studios in Nice. Ingram liked Merle's exotic appearance. She was quickly hired to be an extra in a party scene.

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 jolt when 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.

Oberon's career went on to greater heights partly as a result of her relationship with and later marriage to director 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. She received her only Oscar nomination for The Dark Angel (1935) produced by Goldwyn. Around this time she had a serious romance with David Niven. She was slated to star in Korda's film of 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 the hit film A Song to Remember (1945), and as Empress Josephine in Désirée (1954). 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 in Hollywood, she masqueraded as Oberon's maid.

According to Princess Merle, the biography written by Charles Higham, 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.

Her mother died in 1937, and in 1949 Oberon commissioned paintings of her mother from an old photograph, instructing the artist to lighten her mother's complexion. The paintings would hang in all her homes until her death in 1979. Also, Oberon supposedly had a minor obsession with facial injuries after her own accident, and had an affair with Richard Hillary who had been burned after his Supermarine Spitfire was shot down in 1940.

Merle Oberon divorced Sir Alexander Korda in 1945, to marry cinematographer Lucien Ballard. Ballard devised a special camera light for her to eliminate her facial scars on film. The light became known as the "Obie".

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 was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to Motion Pictures, at 6250 Hollywood Boulevard.

Throughout her professional life, Oberon denied her mixed-race Indian background but maintained the fiction that she had been born and raised in 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. She is only known to have been to Australia once, when she agreed to visit Tasmania towards the end of her life. However, she was not seen in public, and she became ill shortly before attending a reception in her honour in Hobart; those who might have been in a position to confirm or disprove her Tasmanian connection were denied the opportunity to meet her and question her. The story of her alleged Tasmanian connections was comprehensively debunked after her death, yet there are still many people in Tasmania who claim to have known her as a child, and will apparently not be convinced otherwise. Unconvinced, however, was Warner Brothers megastar Errol Flynn, a real Tasmanian, who publicly chided Oberon.

                       

Courtesy of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merle_Oberon