One of the most glamorous stars of the 1930s and 40s in Hollywood, the exotic Merle Oberon had a secret, one she spent her lifetime protecting.

In interviews like this one in 1934 with the publication The West Australian, Oberon kept up the fiction of her birth: “I was born in Tasmania but left there when I was a child. Since my films have been circulated, several people in odd parts of Australia have bobbed up to claim me as a relation … I don’t know very much about them because my family quarreled with them some time ago.”

Passing for white was imperative. Biracial and mixed-race actors had no place in the film industry at the time when interracial marriage was banned in 30 states. The Motion Picture Production Code (the Hays Code) adopted by the industry cracked down on any portrayal of miscegenation, defined as “sex relationships between the white and black races.” Films with such depictions were not given a seal of approval to be released.

The biography that Oberon created for herself said that she was born in faraway Tasmania, a white colony of the British Empire, and moved to India to live with her godparents following her British army officer father’s death in a hunting accident. The reality was that she was actually born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1911 and her father, Arthur Thompson, was a railway engineer who had a sexual relationship with her then 12-year-old mother, Constance Selby, who was the daughter of Thompson’s wife Charlotte. Charlotte was a Eurasian of partial Ceylonese and Maori heritage as were her daughter and granddaughter. (Thompson joined the British army in 1914 and died of pneumonia during the war.) Oberon was brought up by her grandmother and grew up believing her mother was her sister, a fiction that was maintained in order to hush up the scandal of her birth. When she moved to the US via France and England in search of fame and fortune in the movies, Charlotte moved with her pretending to be her maid. Oberon would only talk to her in Hindi.

It was only after her death that details of her birth were found through a project of the British Library and findmypast.co.uk which published 200 years of records of the British Raj in India. Oberon’s birth certificate was among the records, records she had said were lost in a fire.

What little is known of Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson, Oberon’s birth name was that she moved to Calcutta in 1917 and performed onstage with the Calcutta Amateur Theatrical Society in 1920 under the name Queenie Thompson.

At the time, and to an extent even today in India, Anglo-Indians were neither accepted as British or Indian, and it is likely that the young Oberon had a difficult childhood. There are reports that she was home-schooled after dropping out of the exclusive La Martiniere academy as she was bullied because of her mixed ancestry.

Moving to France in 1928 at age 17 with an introduction to director Rex Ingram, Oberon was given an extra role in his silent film The Three Passions. She moved on to England that same year and struggled to find roles, appearing uncredited in bit parts in several films, trying to support herself as a hostess in a nightclub. Her breakthrough came with the supporting role of Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII directed by Alexander Korda whom she would later marry.

The success of Henry VIII led to leading roles in several films, including The Private Life of Don Juan in 1934 opposite Douglas Fairbanks, again directed by Korda. She then made The Scarlet Pimpernel also in 1934, opposite Leslie Howard with whom she had an affair.

Oberon moved to the US when she was offered a role in 1935’s Folies Bergère de Paris with Frederic March and then went on to win an Oscar nomination for The Dark Angel in 1936. A bad car accident the following year left her with facial scars, and the film she was working on with Charles Laughton, I, Claudius, was abandoned. With the help of lighting and makeup, Oberon made The Divorce of Lady X in 1938 with Laurence Olivier. Her next film and her best-known, 1939’s Wuthering Heights also with Olivier, was made for Samuel Goldwyn and directed by William Wyler.

Olivier and Oberon did not get on. It was Olivier’s first US production and he had hoped that his soon-to-be wife Vivien Leigh would get the part of Cathy. Oberon was cast instead, and Olivier made his displeasure known in lots of petty ways, detailed in the 1997 book by Jan Herman, “A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler.”

Oberon grumbled about their love scenes. She stopped one in the middle of a take. “You know, you spat at me,” she said. “You had a drop of spittle come flying across in your goddamned passion. You spat, and it hit me.”

“Oh, Merle, I beg your pardon,” Olivier said testily. “But these things do happen between actors.”

On the retake Oberon lost her temper.

“That was worse than anything I’ve ever seen in my life,” she snapped. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a badly played shot if I may say so – and you spat again!”

“Why you amateur little bitch,” Olivier fumed. “What’s a little spit for crissake between actors? You bloody little idiot, how dare you speak to me…”

Before he could finish, Oberon fled in tears.

Wyler lost his patience. “Go on after her and make it up,” he said.

“No, sir,” Olivier told him. “I [won’t] be insulted by snippets like that.”

Despite the tension between the principals, the film is considered a masterpiece and a highlight of both their careers. From Herman’s book – “Goldwyn took such enormous pride in the picture that he proclaimed it his own greatest achievement. “I made it,” he insisted. “Wyler only directed it.”

Oberon and Korda were married in 1939, but neither was faithful. Among her many affairs was an on-and-off one with John Wayne that lasted almost a decade.

The next few films in Oberon’s oeuvre were 1940’s Till We Meet Again, That Uncertain Feeling in 1941 and Affectionately Yours, also in 1941.

Korda was knighted by the King in 1942 and Oberon became Lady Korda, but that was not enough to keep the marriage going. The two divorced in 1945 and Oberon had affairs with studio chief Joe Schenck and actors Rod Taylor and Robert Ryan before she married cinematographer Lucien Ballard. He had invented a light for the camera that minimized Oberon’s scars called the ‘obie.’ The light was also said to lighten her skin tone on camera. They divorced in 1949.

She then made forgettable films like The Lodger (1944), A Song to Remember (1945), Night Song (1947), Berlin Express (1948) and Desiree (1954). By now, Oberon’s career was on a definite downswing, and the musical Deep in My Heart (1954) and the noir The Price of Fear (1956) did nothing to reverse the trend. In the meantime, she married Italian industrialist Bruno Pagliai in 1957, adopted two children with him, and moved the family to Acapulco. After divorcing Pagliai in 1973, she married actor Robert Wolders in 1975 whom she met while making her last film, Interval which she also produced. He was 36, she was 61. They moved to Malibu.

All through her life, Oberon was vigilant about hiding her past. When Oberon’s nephew by marriage, writer Michael Korda, wanted to write a memoir called “Charmed Lives,” Oberon threatened to sue him if he mentioned any details about her background. She canceled a public appearance in Australia rather than face the press questions about her life when she and Wolders visited Hobart in 1978 as Wolders wanted to see her ‘birthplace.’ At a function in her honor, she finally admitted that she wasn’t born in Tasmania and collapsed.

A year later, she would die of a stroke at age 68 on November 23, 1979.

Oberon received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.