Merle Oberon (19 February 1911 – 23 November 1979) was an Anglo-Indian actress. She began her film career in British films as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). After her success in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), she travelled to the United States to make films for Samuel Goldwyn. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Dark Angel (1935). A traffic collision in 1937 caused facial injuries that could have ended her career, but she soon followed this with her most renowned performance in Wuthering Heights (1939).Throughout her adult life, in order to conceal her Indian heritage she maintained the fiction that she was born in Tasmania, Australia; she concocted a story that all her school records had been destroyed in a fire, which meant it could be neither proven nor disproven. She maintained these fictions throughout her professional life. The year before she died she finally admitted this story was not true, and records located since her death have confirmed her true origin.
[on Ernst Lubitsch in That Uncertain Feeling (1941)] That was probably the happiest picture I ever made because Lubitsch was such a funny man, such a darling man. He played the piano between every take, and there would be laughs. Then I always ask him to do the scene for me before I did it only to have a laugh.
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Even when I was single, I owned homes and gardens. I buy beauty when other women buy jewels. Land is security to me. I need gardens that are mine to walk on.
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Without security, it is difficult for a woman to look or feel beautiful.
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Fact
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To date (2016), Oberon is the only Asian actress to be nominated as Best Actress.
Although she made three films opposite Charles Korvin, she said in an interview in the February 1982 issue of "Films in Review" that he was not a good actor.
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Most early biographies of Merle Oberon credited "Service for Ladies" as her first Korda film, but she was not in it or "Never Trouble Trouble", another incorrect attribute.
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According to an interview with Oberon in the February 1982 edition of "Films in Review", Samuel Goldwyn owed her over a million dollars to her for a series of pictures. He allegedly cried to her that he did not have the money. According to her, she told him to forget about it even though she still owed agent's fees to Myrom Selznick. Some years later, Oberon asked Mrs. Goldwyn if she could buy a print of Wuthering Heights (1939) to complete her collection of films for her children but was refused.
The miniseries Queenie (1987) starring Mia Sara is based on a book by Merle's nephew, loosely based on her life.
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In 1949, 12 years after her mother's death, she commissioned a painting of her mother from an old photograph, instructing the painter to lighten her mother's complexion in the painting to hide the fact that she was part-Indian.
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Her will left most of her money to be divided between her children. She left $1 million to the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital. Her husband, Robert Wolders, got nothing, at his own request.
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The two children she had during her marriage to Bruno Pagliai, Francesca Pagliai and Bruno Pagliai Jr., were adopted.
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Early publicity stated that she was born in Tasmania, Australia, rather than India. At that time, a Tasmanian background was considered "classier" than her true mixed race origins.
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Had extremely sensitive skin. She suffered from cosmetic poisoning twice, the second of which left permanent scarring.
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Her father hailed from Britain and her mother from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
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To hide her half-Indian parentage, she would tell friends and acquaintances that the older woman who lived in her house was her maid; the woman was actually her mother.
Because of facial scars the actress sustained in a London car crash in 1937, her future husband, cinematographer Lucien Ballard, designed a compact spotlight that he coined the "Obie" (Oberon's nickname). Mounted on the side of the camera, the device lights the subject head on, thus reducing the incidence of unflattering facial lines and shadows.
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Following her death, she was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, in the Garden of Remembrance.
$1.5 Million
