Australians in Hollywood : Biographical Notes

Merle Oberon
Although some sources still identify Merle Oberon (1911-1979) as having been born in Tasmania , it is now generally believed that she was born and raised in India. The Tasmanian story was evidently concocted by studio publicists to account for the actress's “mixed” parentage. Oberon was obliged to maintain the fiction for the whole of her career – only a year before her death she attended a “homecoming” reception in Hobart thrown by the Mayor. Moreover, when her Singhalese mother stayed with Oberon in Hollywood , she was obliged to pose as Merle's maid. As Maree Delofski's recent documentary “The Trouble with Merle” records, there is still a strong strain of folklore in Tasmania that claims Oberon as a local. A star of Hollywood 's Golden Age, Merle Oberon was Cathy to Olivier's Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1939), and was also in A Song To Remember (1945), Till We Meet Again (1940), Deep in My Heart (1954) and Hotel (1967). Her final statement on the matter of her origins was that she had been born on a ship that happened to be “passing through Tasmania ” at the instant of her birth.

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