Merle Oberon, a black-and-white-era Hollywood star, is a forgotten icon in his native India.
Best known for playing the title role in the classic "Wuthering Heights" (1939), Oberon was an Anglo-Indian born in Bombay in 1911. But as a star in Hollywood's Golden Age, she kept her background under wraps, posing as white for several years. all his life.
Mayukh Sen, a US-based writer and academic, first came across her name in 2009 when he discovered that Oberon had been the first person of South Asian origin to be nominated for an Oscar.
His fascination grew when he watched his movies and delved into his past.
"As a queer person, I empathize with this feeling that you have to hide a part of your identity to survive in a hostile society that isn't really ready to accept who you are," he says.
Sen is working on a biography to tell the story of the actress from a South Asian perspective.
A mother who was not the mother
Oberon, whose real name was Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson, was born in Bombay in 1911 when India was a British colony.
Her mother was part Ceylon, today Sri Lanka, and part Maori, while her father was British.
The family moved to Calcutta in 1917 after Oberon's father died in 1914, and she began acting thanks to that city's Amateur Theater Society in the 1920s.
After seeing a movie for the first time in 1925, the silent film "The Angel of Darkness," Oberon was inspired by its protagonist, Vilma Bánky, to become an actress, according to Sen.
She went to France in 1928, after an army colonel introduced her to director Rex Ingram, who gave her small parts in her films.
Oberon's mother, Charlotte Selby, who had the darker skin of hers, accompanied her as her maid.
A 2002 documentary called The Trouble with Merle (in Spanish, "The Problem with Merle") later discovered that Selby was, in fact, Oberon's grandmother.
Selby's daughter Constance had Oberon when she was a teenager, but the two were reportedly raised together as sisters for a few years.
The Tasmanian lie
Oberon's first big break came from Alexander Korda, a filmmaker she would later marry, who cast her as Anne Boleyn in "The Private Life of Henry VIII" (1933).
Korda's publicists supposedly had to make up a story to explain her origins.
"Tasmania was chosen as her new birthplace because it was so far from the US and Europe (in Australia) and was generally considered 'British' to the core," wrote Marée Delofski, director of The Trouble with Merle, in his notes on the documentary.
Oberon posed as an upper-class girl from Hobart (Tasmania's capital) who moved to India after her father was killed in a hunting accident, Delofski said.
However, the actress soon became an intrinsic part of local Tasmanian lore and, for the rest of her career, the Australian media followed her closely with pride and curiosity.
She even credited Tasmania as her origin and rarely mentioned India.
But Calcutta remembered her. "In the 1920s and 1930s there were passing mentions of her in the memories of many English men" who lived in the Indian city, says journalist Sunanda K. Datta Ray.
"People said that she was born in the city, that she was an operator of the telephone exchange, and that she won a contest at the Firpo restaurant," she adds.
Arrival in Hollywood
As she was making more films in Hollywood, Oberon moved to the United States, and in 1935 she was nominated for an Oscar for her role in a new version of "The Angel of Darkness".
But it was her performance in "Wuthering Heights" alongside acting legend Laurence Olivier that cemented her place in the industry.
They supposedly chose her over Vivien Leigh, another Indian-born actress, because the team behind the film felt she was a bigger name, Sen says.
A review of the film published in The New York Times when it was released stated that Oberon had "perfectly captured the moody, restless spirit of (Emily) Brontë's heroine".
The late 1930s catapulted Oberon into the so-called big leagues, Sen narrates. Her inner circle included such figures as the music composer Cole Porter and the playwright Noël Coward.
