As Wuthering Heights’ Catherine Earnshaw, Merle Oberon runs through a gamut of emotions over her tumultuous love affair with Heathcliff, played by Sir Laurence Olivier.
“I’m yours Heathcliff,” she tells him on her deathbed. “I’ve never been anyone else’s.”
Even as Merle played the quintessentially British heroine in the big-screen adaptation of a master work of English literature, she was hiding a big secret about her heritage.
“She was born Estelle Merle Thompson in Mumbai [India],” Mayukh Sen, author of the new Merle Oberon biography Love, Queenie, exclusively tells Closer. “Her mother was half Sinhalese, half white.”
Secrets had been kept about Merle since her birth to her teenage mother Constance in 1911. She was “the result of a rape at the hands of Constance’s stepfather, a white man from Darlington, England,” says Sen, who explains that Merle was raised in near poverty by her grandmother and told that Constance was her half-sister.
A beautiful and bright child, she set her sights on acting early. Merle attended La Martinière Calcutta, a private school, on a scholarship.
“Many students alienated her because of her mixed-race background,” explains Sen. “Anglo- Indians like Merle occupied a pretty subordinate position within British India.”
Merle Oberon’s White Lies
Arriving in London at 17, Merle began playing small parts.
“She was often asked to play roles of foreign women — French or Spanish or even Japanese,” says Sen, who explains that Merle’s chance meeting with director Alexander Korda, who would become her first husband, put her on a new path.
He helped Merle invent a backstory that she was born to white parents on the Australian island of Tasmania. If the truth about Merle’s heritage had been known, she never would have been accepted as a leading lady in Hollywood. In the 1930s, the Hays Code banned interracial romances in films, which limited opportunities for people of color. At the same time, immigration to America by people from India was severely restricted.
“For her to gain entry into America as anything other than a tourist she would have to pass as white,” says Sen.
Despite Merle’s success in films, there were whispers.
“Even high-profile papers like the Washington Post started to print rumors that her mother was ‘a Hindu,’” says Sen, who notes that at the time the term was used for “anyone who was of South Asian heritage,” regardless of their religion.
Merle, who claimed her original birth certificate had been lost in a fire, denied it. Although her career never surpassed her 1936 Oscar nomination, Merle found a secure, comfortable life, especially with her third husband, Italian-born industrialist Bruno Pagliai.
“He was this unfathomably rich man who was born in Italy but based in Mexico,” Sen says. “It was during her marriage to him that Merle lived in all of these lavish homes.”
But it wasn’t enough. In the 1970s, she left Pagliai for Robert Wolders, a much younger man who grew to suspect the truth, but remained devoted to Merle.
“On a visit to Tasmania, her fictitious birthplace, in 1978, Merle suffered a breakdown and he began to wonder about the veracity of this alleged backstory,” says Sen. “Even her children had been completely in the dark about it. Only after her death, they learned that she had grown up in India in poverty.”