Merle Oberon
Merle Oberon (18 February 1911 – 23 November 1979) was an Indian-born British actress.
She began her film career in British films, and a prominent role, as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), brought attention to her. Leading roles in such films as The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) advanced her career, and she travelled to the United States to make films for Samuel Goldwyn. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Dark Angel (1935). A traffic collision in 1937 caused facial injuries that could have ended her career, but she soon followed this with one of her most successful films, Wuthering Heights (1939).
Her career continued successfully during the 1940s; by the end of the decade her career was in decline and her acting performances over the following years were relatively few.
From the early days of her career, Oberon succeeded in establishing a fabricated history of her origins in which she said that she had been born in Tasmania, Australia. She maintained this story to conceal that she was of mixed-race Indian background, as she believed the truth would have destroyed her career prospects due to societal expectations and restrictions at that time.
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