Writing anything about the early life of Merle Oberon risks being wrong. She herself was unaware of all the details of her life, probably, and lied about some of the ones she did know. It is certain that she would not have had the career she did were the truth about her origins commonly known at the time. That isn’t speculation; that’s the rules of the Code. It doesn’t matter how astonishingly beautiful she was, how talented she was, how much the camera loved her. What would have mattered was her origins, because casting her as a romantic lead would have led to charges of miscegenation.

She was born Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson. She claimed to have been born in Tasmania, which was exotic but “safe.” In fact, she was born in Mumbai. Bombay, British India, as it was in 1911. She was raised as the daughter of Charlotte Selby, herself of mixed European, Indian, and Maori descent. However, a later look into her birth records indicate that she was in fact the daughter of Charlotte’s twelve-year-old daughter Constance. Charlotte seems to have been unmarried; Wikipedia says her birth certificate lists Charlotte’s “partner,” Arthur Thompson, as Merle’s father—and Constance as her mother. When she was three, Arthur Thompson joined the British Army and later died of pneumonia at the Battle of the Somme.

The girl nicknamed “Queenie” got a scholarship to La Martiniere Calcutta, an independent private school, but the other children taunted her about her mixed ethnicity. She dropped out. She met and dated a former actor who distanced himself from her when he saw her biological grandmother around her apartment, but he did set up an introduction for her to Rex Ingram, and from there, Merle’s career took off. She was in a car accident in 1937 and suffered an allergic reaction that damaged her skin in 1940.

She commissioned a painting of Charlotte to be based on photographs, which she displayed around her house—but she had the painter lighten Charlotte’s skin, so no one could tell she was Eurasian. She visited Tasmania a couple of times but seems to have done what she could to avoid actually standing before the people there and claiming to be one of them. She told so many lies about her origins, in fact, that there’s a documentary about her origins that tries to untangle it, which is where the facts about Charlotte and Constance are revealed—one of her “nephews” went looking into the family records and discovered that Merle was his half-sister instead. But she wouldn’t meet with him or acknowledge it.

To this day, she remains the only Asian woman nominated for Best Actress, a claim that I’m not sure she would accept. (Though, you know, if we’re accepting Charlize Theron as the only African woman to win Best Actress, or I believe even be nominated, just being born in Mumbai certainly qualifies you.) She is not, I think, a woman who comes up often enough in discussions of the great actresses of the Golden Age of Hollywood. But apparently, some of the roots of The Princess Bride are in Wuthering Heights, and no one will ever surpass Merle Oberon as Cathy.

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