Merle Oberon: Passing White and Succeeding in Hollywood

“As a queer person, I understand that feeling that you have to hide part of your identity to survive in a hostile society that’s not really ready to accept who you are,” he says.

Sen is working on a biography to tell the actress’ story from a South Asian perspective.

Oberon, real name Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson, was born in Bombay in 1911, at a time when India was a British colony.

His mother was part Ceylon – now Sri Lankan – and part Maori, while his father was British.

The family moved to Calcutta in 1917 after Oberon’s father died in 1914, and began performing through the Calcutta Amateur Theatrical Society in the 1920s.

After seeing film for the first time in the 1925 silent film “Angel of Darkness,” Oberon was inspired by actress Vilma Bánky, according to Sen.

She left for France in 1928, after an army colonel introduced her to director Rex Ingram, who gave her small roles in his films.

Oberon’s mother, Charlotte Selby, who was darker-skinned, accompanied him as maid.

A 2002 documentary titled The Trouble with Merle later discovered that Selby was, in fact, Oberon’s grandmother.

Selby’s daughter Constance had Oberon as a teenager, but the two were reportedly raised together as sisters for a few years.

Oberon’s first big breakthrough came from Alexander Korda, a filmmaker she would later marry, who cast her as Anne Boleyn in “The Private Life of Henry VIII” (1933).

Korda’s publicists should have made up a story to explain its origins.

“Tasmania was chosen as her new birthplace because it was so far from the United States and Europe (in Australia) and was generally considered British ‘to the core’, wrote Marée Delofski, director of The Trouble with Merle, in his notes on the documentary.

Oberon posed as an upper-class girl from Hobart (Tasmania’s capital) who moved to India after her father was killed in a hunting accident, Delofski said.

However, the actress quickly became a fixture of local lore in Tasmania, and for the rest of her career the Australian media followed her closely with pride and curiosity.

She even acknowledged Tasmania as her origin and rarely mentioned India.

But Calcutta remembered her. “In the 1920s and 1930s there were passing mentions in the memoirs of many English men” who lived in the Indian town, says journalist Sunanda K. Datta Ray.

“People said she was born in town, she was a telephone exchange operator and she won a competition at the Firpo restaurant,” she adds.

As she made more films in Hollywood, Oberon moved to the United States and in 1935 she was nominated for an Oscar for her role in a new version of “The Angel of Darkness”.

But it was her performance in “Wuthering Heights,” opposite legend Laurence Olivier, that cemented her place in the industry.

They supposedly cast her over Vivien Leigh, another Indian-born actress, because the team behind the film thought she was a bigger name, Sen says.

A review of the film published in The New York Times upon its release said that Oberon had “perfectly captured the changing and restless spirit of (Emily) Brontë’s heroine”.

The late 1930s catapulted Oberon into the big leagues, says Sen. His inner circle included figures such as music composer Cole Porter and playwright Noël Coward.

Korda and veteran producer Samuel Goldwyn helped Oberon change things like his accent, which would have revealed his South Asian origins, Sen says.

But Oberon’s secret weighed heavily on her, even though her fair skin color made her easy to pass as white on screen.

“She still often felt the need to silence the frequent whispers that she was mixed race. Film journalists of her day noted her more tanned complexion,” Sen explains.

Some reports claim that Oberon’s skin was damaged by bleaching treatments.

After a car accident in 1937, cinematographer Lucien Ballard developed a technique that lit her in a way that disguised what had happened (Oberon divorced Korda and married Ballard in 1945).

“Some sources have suggested that the technique was also a way to whitewash Merle’s face on camera,” Sen explains.

Oberon’s nephew, Michael Korda, who published a family memoir titled “Alexander Korda: A Dream Life” in 1979, said he did not divulge details of her past because she threatened to do so. to sue for mentioning his real name and place of birth.

“I thought that was all in the past, but she still cared a lot about her past,” he said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Over time, the stuffing became harder to sustain.

In 1965 Oberon canceled public appearances and cut short a trip to Australia after learning that local reporters were curious about his background.

Reports from that time claimed she was upset when she last visited Tasmania in 1978, as questions about her identity kept coming up.

But she never admitted the truth in public. She died in 1979 of a stroke.

In 1983, her Anglo-Indian heritage was revealed in a biography, Princess Merle: The Romantic Life of Merle Oberon.

The authors found his birth certificate in Bombay, his baptismal certificate, as well as letters and photographs held by his Indian parents.

Through her book, Sen hopes to convey the enormous pressures Oberon faced as a South Asian woman “navigating an industry that was not designed for her and producing such moving work while fighting these battles.”

“Dealing with these struggles shouldn’t have been easy. It’s more helpful to sympathize with her than to judge her.”