Merle Oberon was a beautiful, dark-haired leading lady of British and American films, who became more famous for the film she didn’t make than for the films she did.
Her best period was the 1930s and 1940s because after the 1950s her career just faded away and she made only sporadic appearances.
Oberon was a talented and exotic actress but could only gain just one Oscar nomination for her skills.
In 1935, as she was appearing in the great epic I, Claudius, she was involved in a serious car accident and needed to be hospitalised for a very long time. As a result the project was abandoned and the film was never made.
It is a pity, because from surviving footage Oberon looked strikingly beautiful. This episode was also the subject of a television documentary called The Epic that Never Was (1966).
Oberon claimed to have been born in Hobart, Tasmania, but her birth certificate clearly indicates that she was born Estelle Merle Thompson in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, on February 19, 1911 – 100 years ago yesterday. Her father was Arthur Thompson, a British railway engineer, and her mother was Charlotte Selby, a Eurasian from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
Oberon’s father died from pneumonia while serving in the trenches with the British Army during World War I, and mother and daughter had to lead an impoverished life for a few years.
Things started to look up when they moved to Calcutta after the young Oberon received a scholarship to attend the well-known private school, La Martiniere Calcutta.
Oberon grew up loving cinema, and when she took an interest in acting, she joined the Calcutta Amateur Dramatic Society and took part in some of their productions.
While working as a telephone operator, she was urged by a former actor to move to France and he arranged for her to meet the famous director, Rex Ingram, who was immediately impressed by her exotic beauty and put her as an extra in his film, The Three Passions (1929).
Oberon arrived in England in 1928 and worked as a nightclub hostess under the name Queenie O’Brien, while appearing in films in many minor and unbilled parts.
Her big break came in 1931 when she met film producer Alexander Korda, who would become her first husband in 1939.
Changing her name to the one we are familiar with, Korda began building up her career by putting her in several uncredited parts. Finally, Oberon played her first featured role, albeit a small one, in A Warm Corner (1930) and had her first big role in Wedding Rehearsal (1933).
Oberon’s career was on the way up as she played Anne Boleyn in the lavish production of The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), and then appeared opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Private Life of Don Juan and got the female lead in The Scarlet Pimpernel (both 1934).
When Hollywood came calling, Oberon crossed the Atlantic and became an instant success, largely because her British film, The Broken Melody (1934), was already a great hit in America. Her first Hollywood film was Folies Bergere, and then she received her only Oscar nomination as a girl in love with two men in The Dark Angel (both films were released in 1935).
Oberon’s career continued to flourish with an outstanding performance as a schoolteacher involved in a sex scandal maliciously invented by a student in These Three (1936). The film was based on a story by Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour; it was remade in 1962 under its original title and was released in Malta as The Loudest Whisper.
After recovering from her car accident, Oberon went back before the cameras in the romantic comedy, The Divorce of Lady X (1938), appeared in Over the Moon, and played Cathy to Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (both 1939). Before the decade ended she went back to England to make the propaganda film The Lion Has Wings (1939).
The 1940s were also a busy period for Oberon, as she appeared in no fewer than 16 films, including ’Til We Meet Again (1940), Lydia (1941), Forever and a Day (1943), The Lodger (1944), A Song to Remember (1945) and Berlin Express (1948).
By the 1950s, however, Oberon’s career began to fade. Her most notable films from here on include 24 Hours in a Woman’s Life (1952), which was her last British film, Désirée, opposite Marlon Brando, Deep in My Heart (both 1954), The Price of Fear (1956), The Oscar (1966) and Hotel (1967).
Her final appearance on the big screen was in Interval (1973), but she also did some television work.
After divorcing Korda in 1945, she married three more times: in 1945 to Lucien Ballard, divorcing him in 1949; to Bruno Pagliai in 1957, divorcing him in 1973, after adopting two children, Francesca and Bruno; and in 1975 to Robert Wolders, who survived her.
Oberon died in Malibu, California, on November 23, 1979, after a massive stroke.