THE SECRET She Hid From the World

THE OSCAR-NOMINATED ACTRESS NEVER SPOKE ABOUT HER REAL CHILDHOOD

- MERLE OBERON

As Wuthering Heights’ Catherine Earnshaw, Merle Oberon runs through a gamut of emotions over her tumultuous love affair with Heathcliff, played by Sir Laurence Olivier. “I’m yours Heathcliff,” she tells him on her deathbed. “I’ve never been anyone else’s.”

Even as Merle played the quintessentially British heroine in the big-screen adaptation of a master work of English literature, she was hiding a big secret about her heritage. “She was born Estelle Merle Thompson in Mumbai [India],” Mayukh Sen, author of the new Merle Oberon biography Love, Queenie, tells Closer. “Her mother was half Sinhalese, half white.”

Secrets had been kept about Merle since her birth to her teenage mother Constance in 1911. She was “the result of a rape at the hands of Constance’s stepfather, a white man from Darlington, England,” says Sen, who explains that Merle was raised in near poverty by her grandmother and told that Constance was her half-sister.

A beautiful and bright child, she set her sights on acting early. Merle attended La Martinière Calcutta, a private school, on a scholarship. “Many students alienated her because of her mixed-race background,” explains Sen. “Anglo-Indians like Merle occupied a pretty subordinate position within British India.”

WHITE LIES