Compiled by Tina Edward Gunawardhana
Illustrations by Naeem Riad based on original photos from the Internet
In March 2023, the world celebrated as Malaysian born actress Michelle Yeoh made history by becoming the first Asian woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. However, long before this, Hollywood actress Merle Oberon became the first Asian woman to be nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Actress category in 1936 for her performance in The Dark Angel. Till her death in 1979 Merle Oberon hid the fact that she was of mixed Ceylonese and English heritage. It wasn’t until the publication of her 1983 biography, written by Charles Higham, that her secret ancestry came to light.
Merle Oberon was an actress who was mired in controversy. Reams have been written about this sultry Hollywood actress including the fact that she tried to hide her Ceylonese ancestry for reasons best known to herself. For most of her life, Merle protected herself by concealing the truth about her parentage, claiming that she had been born in Tasmania, Australia, and that her birth records had been destroyed in a fire. Some believe that Oberon hid her mixed heritage out of fear of discrimination and the impact it would have had on her career
Merle Oberon was born Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson on 19th February 2011 in Bombay, India. She was given the nickname of “Queenie” in honour of Queen Mary who visited India in 1911. Although records state that her father was Arthur Terrence O’Brien Thompson a mechanical engineer from the northern English town of Darlington who worked in the Indian Railways and her mother was Charlotte Selby, an Eurasian from Ceylon, the reality was different. Birth records reveal that Merle’s biological mother was in actual fact Charlotte’s then-12-year-old daughter, Constance who gave birth to Merle as a result of being raped by an Anglo Irish foreman of a tea plantation. In an attempt to shield Merle from this trauma Charlotte raised her as her own and convinced Merle that her teenage mother Constance was actually her half sister. Whilst Merle and Charlotte would remain together for the rest of the lives, Constance became estranged from the family and died without ever reconciling with them.
Merle’s father died in 1914 when she was only three years old. Then the family moved to Calcutta in 1917. In Calcutta, Merle won a scholarship to one of the city’s best all-girls private schools, only for classmates to drive her out with their overt racism. Mixed-race children like Merle were not uncommon at this time in India, but their place in society was a fragile one. Considered not to be truly Indian, they occupied a position below the British occupiers and were seen to be a sign of scandal and proof of the promiscuous nature of their Anglo Asian mothers.
