Adorable Story #29: Merle Oberon

How a girl from Calcutta entered Hollywood's "Big League"

“A lady whose beauty is not only a legend, but a reality”

— Charlton Heston

Indian-born actress Merle Oberon (1911 - 1979) with her husband, Italian industrialist Bruno Pagliai, in the garden of their home in Acapulco, 1958. The sculptures were found at Coyoacan, and the pool and fountain were designed by Oberon herself — © Photo by Slim Aarons / Getty Images

Merle Oberon was a glamorous actress of Hollywood’s Golden Era, known for her beauty and elegance on screen.

---

If you aren’t subscribed yet, hit the subscribe button below to receive this email every weekend, directly in your inbox:

---

She was born Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson in Bombay, British India on February 19, 1911. Her father was Arthur Terrence O’Brien Thompson, an Anglo-Irish mechanical engineer for the Indian Railways. Her mother was Constance Selby, believed to have been of Sri Lankan and Māori ancestry: she was just 14 when she gave birth to Merle in 1911.

In India, after centuries of intermixing, babies born from biracial relationships had evolved into a quiet shame — shunned by Britons and Indians alike.

Childhood

Merle had a difficult childhood.

Young Merle was just three years old when her father, Arthur Thompson, died during WWI. It was 1914 when he perished of pneumonia while at the Battle of the Somme’s Western Front.

The family nicknamed Merle “Queenie”, as her birth coincided with Queen Mary and King George’s visit to India.

In an attempt to soften Merle’s lot in life, her grandmother (then 26 years old) raised her as her own daughter and convinced her that her teenage mother was actually her half-sister.

But that wasn’t enough to shield Merle from the relentless taunts over her mixed heritage.

At the age of 14, after a cross-country move to Calcutta (now Kolkata), Merle won a scholarship to La Martiniere Calcutta School for Girls, one of the city’s best all-girls private schools.

Calcutta

Once in Calcutta her classmates immediately bullied her and ultimately drove her out of La Martiniere with their overt racism: they targeted her home life, since she had no father anymore, and her single mother (actually, as we now know, her biological grandmother) was poor and a woman of color.