how Merle Oberon hid her race from Hollywood

With dark, lustrous hair and mysterious eyes, Merle Oberon seemed the perfect choice to play Anne Boleyn in the 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII. Henrys second wife is described in the historical records as possessing black hair and an oval face of sallow complexion and Oberons otherworldly beauty appeared to capture the

With dark, lustrous hair and mysterious eyes, Merle Oberon seemed the perfect choice to play Anne Boleyn in the 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII. Henry’s second wife is described in the historical records as possessing “black hair and an oval face of sallow complexion” and Oberon’s otherworldly beauty appeared to capture the essence of one of the most tragic figures in British history. Only years later would the true significance of the casting become clear: Oberon, it was revealed, had broke new ground as the first non-white actress to play a British royal on screen. 

The importance of dismantling outmoded boundaries around casting and representation is once again at the forefront of conversation with news that Jodie Turner-Smith is to portray Boleyn in a new Channel 5 retelling of the royal’s fateful journey from throne room to chopping block. This has been rightly hailed a breakthrough, as black actors have previously had the opportunity to play British royalty on just a handful of occasions. 

Prior to Turner-Smith, there was Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte in Netflix’s bawdy blockbuster Bridgerton. And in 2016 Sophie Okonedo was Queen Margaret, wife of Henry VI, in the BBC’s The Hollow Crown: The War of The Roses (adapted from Shakespeare’s Henry VI parts one, two and three).

But before all of those there was Merle Oberon, a black and white era star and Oscar nominee who went to lengths to conceal her Asian heritage and to present herself as white. Only after her death in November 1979, would the truth of her background emerge.

To her, it was a secret to be carried to the grave. She may have been nonplussed, then, to discover that her story has inspired novels, mini-series and the 2016 Amazon drama, The Last Tycoon, in which Jennifer Beals is cast as a golden age starlet with secret ancestry.  

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The story of Oberon in many ways begins with the Private Life of Henry VIII. And that story starts with Hungarian-born director and producer, Alexander Korda in the back of a taxi. Korda had been lost in thought when the cabbie broke into song. 

“I’m 'Enery the Eighth, I am 'Enery the Eighth I am, I am!,” the driver chirruped. “I got married to the widow next door, She's been married seven times before.”

This was a eureka moment for the ambitious producer, who had designs not only on conquering British cinema but on steam-rolling Hollywood. Straight away he was on the phone to his financiers with a proposal: a romping retelling of the tale of Henry and his colourful marriages. 

Released in 1933, The Private Life Of Henry VIII crystallised in the public consciousness the idea of Henry as a tubby tyrant, forever gnawing on an oversized chicken drumstick and / or sending one of his wives off for to have her head removed. It also won Britain its first Academy Award, with Charles Laughton named Best Actor for his portrayal as Henry, at the 1934 Oscars. 

Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne Boleyn in Channel 5's new drama Credit: C5

The Private Life of Henry VIII glosses over Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragorn: “her story is of no particular interest – she was a respectable woman. So Henry divorced her.” Instead it kicks off with his marriage to Anne Boleyn. 

The part of Boleyn was played by Oberon, a newcomer who had caught Korda’s eye. She is quietly riveting as Anne, even when the bumpy script does its best to waylay her (“I was told that the executioner was very good,” she stutters meekly as she is about to be hauled away for a close encounter with a sharpened axe).

Oberon claimed to have been born in Tasmania (birthplace to Errol Flynn) to a British Army officer father who had died when she was still a child. Thereafter she was raised by aristocratic Indian godparents. It was all a lie. 

Laurence Olivier And Merle Oberon In Wuthering Heights Credit: Getty

The actress was in fact Anglo-Indian. and grew up in poverty in Mumbai. Born Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson, Oberon, was given the nickname ‘Queenie’ in honour of Queen Mary, who visited Mumbai the year of her birth. Her mother was from Sri Lanka with part Maori heritage. Constance Selby had been just 12 when she gave birth to Merle. Merle’s father, Arthur Thompson, was the boyfriend of Constance’s mother, Charlotte. And far from an army officer he was a railway engineer from Darlington. He did join the army during the First World War, dying of pneumonia during the Somme. 

Merle was raised to believe Charlotte, her grandmother, was her mother and Constance her sister. And when Constance later married and had four more children, they were told that Merle was their aunt (rather than their half-sister). Charlotte herself gave birth to Constance when she was just 14, having been raped by Henry Alfred Selby, the Anglo-Irish foreman of a tea plantation in Sri Lanka.

The truth of her parentage would eventually be revealed to Merle. But she was determined to keep it a secret from the rest of the world. Arriving in England in 1928 at aged 17, she sang in clubs as “Queenie O’Brien” and never, ever, referred to her Indian background. 

Merle Oberon and Frank Sinatra at the Academy Awards, 1955 Credit: Getty

“I couldn't dance or sing or write or paint,” she would say of her early attempts at breaking into show business. “The only possible opening seemed to be in some line in which I could use my face. This was, in fact, no better than a hundred other faces, but it did possess a fortunately photogenic quality.”

Years later, when she was an established star, one of her half-siblings tried to make contact. She refused to see them. By that point, she may have felt it too late to acknowledge her true heritage. In Oberon’s defence, she had a lot to other things to think about. She and Alexander Korda would marry after Henry VIII. Yet their marriage would founder when she suffered terrible facial scarring in a car accident.

The scars could be concealed from the camera only through the use of specialised lighting. This lighting style was christened the “Obie”. Oberon was so impressed she married the cinematographer who had invented it, American Lucien Ballard. 

Merle Oberon in 1940 Credit: Getty

The injuries did not unduly hamper her career. True, the accident had rang a death knell for Korda’s 1937 film I, Claudius – which he had intended to be his masterpiece and in which Merle was to play the Emperor’s third wife Messalina. However, she would go on to act opposite Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff as Cathy in 1939’s Wuthering Heights. By that point she had already received a Best Actress nomination for 1935 melodrama Dark Angel (during which she had embarked on a fling with David Niven).

She continued to act into later life, appearing in both film and TV. She also married on four occasions and had an affair with John Wayne. And she received the ultimate honour of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. 

Through it all Oberon maintained the fiction that she had grown up in Australia. Only in the very final years did the real facts threaten to intrude. In 1978, the year before her death in California at age 68, she was invited to visit Hobart, capital of Tasmania, for a mayoral reception. 

But with her Asian heritage an open secret within the family, it was inevitable that the truth would become known. And hours before the reception the mayor of Hobart was duly made aware of her tenuous connection to Tasmania. To save save face, he pressed on. Yet Oberon, too, was having doubts. 

Merle Oberon with her husband, film producer Alexander Korda Credit: Getty

Upon arriving she denied having been born in Tasmania. On her way to the reception she told the driver that she and her father had been on a ship passing Hobart when he fell ill. 

They’d gone ashore and she had spent some of her early years there. She refused to speak to the local press and never went to the theatre named after her. Ten months later, she passed away in Malibu. 

Yet her legacy did not die with her. In 1985 Michael Korda, nephew of Alexander, wrote a novel about a great beauty of Indian-Irish heritage who grew up in Kolkata but who obscured her origins when she conquered Hollywood. He called the book Queenie. 

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