![]() Not even the 1936 best actress nomination brought Oberon any extra clout. I can see why she had to hide in that way. She was dependent on Goldwyn and Korda for her livelihood. “She was part of this cadre of actors and actresses that were loaned out to make all these movies. And when Oberon’s early work with Korda, whom she eventually married, led to a successful career under Samuel Goldwyn, it became in everyone’s best interest to keep her identity a mystery. With representational casting essentially made illegal, studios embraced yellow and blackface. Rather than leave it up to lawmakers, Hollywood seized on the opportunity to police itself, adopting a set of rules known as the Hays Code – which, among many other things, frowned upon interracial romance. Such was the cost of making it in show business at a time when the US government was keen to crack down on indecency. (Her half-brother, Harry, would discover them in Bombay, now Mumbai, after her death.) As for her much darker-skinned mother – her biological grandmother – Oberon presented her as a maid. (In her lifetime, Oberon visited Australia twice.) Oberon claimed her birth records had been destroyed in a fire. She told people she had been born in Tasmania “because it was so far from the US and Europe and generally considered to be ‘British’ to its core”, wrote Marée Delofski, director of the 2002 documentary The Trouble with Merle. A mad scramble to come up with a cover story for the actor credited as “Merle Oberon” ensued. When she became romantically involved with the Hungarian-born British director Alexander Korda, Oberon’s acting career clicked into high gear.Ī bit part as Anne Boleyn in the 1933 blockbuster The Private Life of Henry VIII announced her breakout. Those who didn’t dump her outright after discovering her race helped sponsor her moves from India to France and England, where she worked for a time as a club hostess under the name Queenie O’Brien. In adolescence, Oberon began honing a posh accent and lightening her skin with bleach creams loaded with ammoniated mercury – a dangerous poison that had more of a weakening effect on Oberon’s many male suitors. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library Ltd/Alamy Merle Oberon and Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel. Films and the nightlife scene became her escape, and playing pretend key to her survival. At the age of three, after a cross-country move to Calcutta, she won a scholarship to one of the city’s best all-girls private schools, only for classmates to drive her out with their overt racism. But that wasn’t enough to shield Oberon from the relentless taunts over her mixed heritage. In an attempt to soften Oberon’s lot in life, her grandmother raised her as her own and convinced her that her teenage mother was actually her half sister. The family nicknamed Oberon “Queenie”, as her birth coincided with Queen Mary and King George’s visit to India. After centuries of intermixing, babies born from biracial relationships had evolved into a quiet shame – shunned by Britons and Indians alike. Her mother, believed to have been of Sri Lankan and Māori ancestry, was just 14 when she gave birth in 1911. Her birth father was the Anglo-Irish foreman of a tea plantation. It became her ticket to a bigger world, the shroud that helped disguise the fact that she was the product of rape. She brings a global aspect to it, the shades of brown.”īorn Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson in what was then the British Indian city of Bombay, Oberon was determined to make the most of her innately fairer complexion. “When you think about the story of racial representation,” says Shilpa Davé, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, “Merle Oberon is a really important part. That, not Oberon’s eye-opening work in The Dark Angel, is what should rightly be hailed as her signature performance. It wasn’t until decades after her death in 1979 at age 68 that the world learned her truth. Where the 60-year-old Yeoh is a butt-kicking film pioneer on the brink of smashing a cultural ceiling for playing a role originally written for Jackie Chan, Oberon carefully hid her true identity to evade certain racial persecution and took that secret to her grave. Photograph: United Artists/AllstarĬritics condemned the declaration as too politically correct, even as it captured the complex tie that binds these women, each a product of her time. Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in Wuthering Heights.
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