Oberon, Merle (1911–1979)

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Oberon, Merle (1911–1979)

Indian-born actress, best known for her performance in Wuthering Heights. Name variations: Queenie Thompson; acted briefly as Estelle Thompson. Born Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson on February 19, 1911, in Bombay, India; died on November 23, 1979, in Los Angeles, California; daughter of Arthur Terrence O'Brien Thompson (a mechanical engineer for the British railways) and Charlotte Constance (Selby) Thompson (a nurse's assistant); attended La Martinière school in Calcutta; married Alexander Korda (a director), in 1939 (divorced 1945); married Lucien Ballard (a cinematographer), in 1945 (divorced 1949); married Bruno Pagliai (an Italian industrialist), in 1957 (divorced 1973); married Robert Wolders (an actor), in 1975; children: Francesca Pagliai and Bruno Pagliai, Jr. (both adopted in 1959).

Selected filmography in U.S., unless otherwise noted:

The Three Passions (UK, bit, 1929); Wedding Rehearsal (UK, 1932); Men of Tomorrow (UK, 1932); The Private Life of Henry VIII (UK, 1933); The Battle (Hara-Kiri or Thunder in the East , UK, 1934); The Broken Melody (UK, 1934); The Private Life of Don Juan (UK, 1934); The Scarlet Pimpernel (UK, 1935); Folies-Bergère (1935); The Dark Angel (1935); These Three (1936); Beloved Enemy (1936); I Claudius (UK, unfinished, 1937); Over the Moon (UK, 1937); The Divorce of Lady X (UK, 1938); The Cowboy and the Lady (1938); Wuthering Heights (1939); The Lion Has Wings (UK, 1939); 'Til We Meet Again (1940); That Uncertain Feeling (1941); Affectionately Yours (1941); Lydia (1941); Forever and a Day (1943); Stage Door Canteen (1943); First Comes Courage (1943); The Lodger (1944); Dark Waters (1944); A Song to Remember (1945); This Love of Ours (1945); Night in Paradise (1946); Temptation (1946); Night Song (1947); Berlin Express (1948); Pardon My French (1951); 24 Hours of a Woman's Life (Affair in Monte Carlo, UK, 1952); Todo es Posible en Granada (Sp., 1954); Desiree (1954); Deep in My Heart (1954); The Price of Fear (1956); Of Love and Desire (1963); The Oscar (1966); Hotel (1967); (also prod., co-edit.) Interval (1973).

Merle Oberon, who is best remembered for her striking portrayal of the tormented Cathy in the 1939 film version of Emily Brontë 's Wuthering Heights, was a popular movie actress during the 1930s and 1940s. Oberon's beauty alone sustained her career into the 1950s, although her private life attracted as much attention as her films; she was married four times and often involved in romantic affairs. Following her death in 1979, Michael Korda, her nephew by her first marriage to Alexander Korda, said of her: "Her greatest achievement was not in her roles, but herself, as Merle Oberon. She was her own work of art."

Oberon kept the details surrounding her birth a secret throughout her life, insisting that she was born into an aristocratic family in Tasmania. In truth, she was born in 1911 in Bombay's overcrowded St. George's Hospital, the daughter of Arthur Terrence O'Brien Thompson, a mechanical engineer for the British railways, and Charlotte Selby Thompson , a Ceylonese nurse's assistant. Fearing she might be ostracized as a half-caste, Merle initiated the lie about her past when she entered show business and by several accounts eventually came to believe her own legend. Oberon was raised in Bombay and Calcutta and was educated until the age of 11 at the strict La Martinière school in Calcutta, an austere place where she was very much a loner. After she left, she was tutored at home by her hard-working mother, then entered business school at the age of 15. Her first job was as a typist in a department store.

At age 17, Oberon made her way to London, where she initially worked as a dance-hall girl under the name Queenie Thompson. By now

a regal beauty, she was hired as an extra in a number of British films and eventually caught the eye of Hungarian-born director-producer Alexander Korda who was starting his own film company and offered the actress a five-year contract. Korda cast her in the small role of Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), the first British talkie to attract an international audience. Oberon went on to play leads with Korda's company, including a Japanese woman in The Battle (1934) and Lady Blakeney in the film adaptation of Emma Orczy 's The Scarlet Pimpernel (1935), opposite Leslie Howard, with whom she also had a love affair. In 1935, Korda sold half her contract to the Goldwyn studios, thus launching Oberon's Hollywood career. Following an inauspicious debut in Folies Bergère (1935), she gained credibility in The Dark Angel (1935), with Fredric March, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1937, Oberon returned to England to star in the ambitious I Claudius with Charles Laughton, but her involvement in a near-fatal car crash halted the already troubled project in mid-production. Following her recovery, Korda starred her in several comedies, including Over the Moon (1937) and The Divorce of Lady X (1938), opposite a very young Laurence-Olivier.

Olivier was her co-star again in Wuthering Heights, although Oberon's first choice for the role of Heathcliff had been Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Olivier had desperately wanted his new love Vivien Leigh for the role of Cathy. Tension on the set was heightened by the dictatorial style of the film's director William Wyler. The finished product, however, bore little evidence of the traumatic shoot, and Oberon's career went into high gear. Frank Nugent, critic for The New York Times, was generous in his acclaim, praising the "wild spirit" that marked her performance. Despite other glowing reviews, Oberon was not nominated for an Academy Award that year, an "appalling" oversight according to her biographers, Charles Higham and Roy Moseley.

Oberon's private life fascinated the gossip columnists, beginning with her engagement in 1934 to Joseph Schenck, producer and chair of the board of 20th Century-Fox, whom she abandoned for actor Leslie Howard, whom she subsequently left for actor David Niven. "It was Merle's pattern," write Higham and Moseley. They also suggest that she was ahead of her time in her choice of men, preferring them to be "neither subservient nor dominating, but to be her equal, her partner and friend as well as her physical lover." Oberon was also married four times; her first husband Alexander Korda was in love with her for years before they wed in 1939. The marriage, however, was failing by 1945, when Oberon met and fell in love with 35-year-old cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who also worked to provide special lighting for the star after a reaction to sulfa drugs and subsequent dermabrasion treatments severely damaged her skin. (Ballard developed and patented a new light, the "Obie," named for Oberon, which was widely used in the industry.) Differences began to emerge between the two, however, early in the relationship. "Merle was prone to daydreams, reveries, and romantic abstractions, whereas Ballard was tough and without interest in mysticism, spiritualism, which was beginning to fascinate Merle," write Higham and Moseley. In the wake of Oberon's divorce from Korda in 1945, the two married, although Ballard later said he dreaded being thought of as "Mr. Merle Oberon," and only married the actress because she wore him down. The union lasted just four years, during which time Oberon met her great love, Count Giorgio Cini, a handsome and wealthy Italian aristocrat who was killed in a plane crash in 1949, not long after Oberon's divorce from Ballard was granted.

While Oberon's private life flourished during the 1940s, her career began to decline. Two successive comedies, That Uncertain Feeling (1941) and Affectionately Yours (1941), failed at the box office, and her performance in Korda's romantic Lydia (1941) disappointed the critics, although she herself thought it was one of her best efforts. A turn as George Sand , in A Song to Remember (1945), opposite Cornel Wilde as Chopin, drew out-and-out ridicule. "William Bendix being Chopin would have been no less incongruous than Merle Oberon being George Sand in a smart sort of Vesta Tilley outfit," snarled critic Richard Winnington. By 1947, Oberon was relegated to the lower half of double bills, and by the mid-1950s was playing supporting roles, notably in Desiree (1954) and Deep in My Heart (1954).

In 1957, Oberon married wealthy Italian industrialist Bruno Pagliai, who, though not good-looking, exuded power, money, and charm. They adopted two children, a girl and a boy, and settled into two lavish homes: one in Mexico City and another in Cuernavaca. While her husband was frequently away on business, Oberon doted on her children and ran her two households with a military precision that frequently strained those who worked for her. While she bloomed as an international hostess, she made fewer and fewer films. One of her infrequent appearances was in Of Love and Desire (1963), filmed in her own house and at her own expense. She hired then-unknown Richard Rush to direct. "As an actress—and as a human being—she was like a jeweled Swiss clock," he said. "Exquisite perfection. Finely timed. One thinks of her as part of an older Hollywood, an older tradition, but her working style was very like that of a Method-trained actor or actress. Everything she did was totally internalized." The finished product, nonetheless, was leveled by the critics, although it did surprisingly well at the box office. Higham and Moseley believe that although it is not a particularly good film, it is one of Oberon's most interesting because it completely captures her spirit. "With its lush musical score, opulent images and scenes of passion, jealousy, abandon, and reconciliation, it is like a Victorian novel, and it was clearly very close to Merle's soul." Two of Oberon's other films of the '60s, The Oscar (1966) and Hotel (1967), both enjoyed wide showings as well.

Oberon also produced her last film, Interval (1973), which was financed by Pagliai, although their marriage was all but over by then. In the movie, Oberon portrays an aging woman who falls in love with a younger man, played by Robert Wolders, her new paramour. The film received scathing reviews, the critic for The New York Times writing that "on a scale of awfulness, it is almost sublime." In 1975, after a difficult split from Pagliai, Oberon and Wolders, who was 25 years her junior, married and settled into a beach house in California.

Following a trip to Australia in the fall of 1978, Oberon was stricken with chest pains, and subsequently underwent heart bypass surgery. The healing process produced thick scars called keloids, which were so painful that she underwent steroid treatments to achieve some relief. Oberon never recovered completely from her ordeal and was even too ill to attend her daughter Francesca Pagliai 's wedding. She died of a stroke on Thanksgiving eve in 1979. (Starting in 1981, Wolders would live with Audrey Hepburn until her death.)

Oberon left a million dollars of her estate to the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital, and the auctioning of her extensive jewelry collection raised close to another million for various other cinema charities. Six years after her death, her nephew Michael Korda wrote a novel based on Oberon's life entitled Queenie (1985), which was made into a television miniseries in 1987.