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Merle Oberon: Charles Higham
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Merle arrived in England for the first time in 1928. Initially she worked as a club hostess under the name Queenie O'Brien and played in minor and unbilled roles in various films. Her film career received a major boost when the director Alexander Korda took an interest and gave her a small but prominent role, under the name Merle Oberon, as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) opposite Charles Laughton. The film became a major success and she was then given leading roles, such as the The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) with Leslie Howard, who became her lover for a while. During her time as a film star, Oberon went to great lengths to disguise her mixed-race background and when her dark-skinned mother moved in with her, she masqueraded as Oberon's maid.
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It wasn't until after she stopped acting that Oberon's family began to talk publicly about her past. Selby had found her birth certificate in the Indian government records office - hard evidence that eluded Delofski. She journeys to Toronto to see it and to talk with Selby, and is shocked at what she finds - Selby is not Oberon's nephew as he told Higham, but her brother.
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According to Princess Merle, the biography written by Charles Higham with Roy Moseley, Merle suffered even further damage to her complexion in 1940 from a combination of cosmetic poisoning and an allergic reaction to sulfa drugs. Alexander Korda sent her to a skin specialist in New York City, where she underwent several dermabrasion procedures. The results... were only partially successful; without makeup, one could see noticeable pitting and indentation of her skin.
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Charles Higham’s biography “Princess Merle” (which he wrote with Roy Moseley) first revealed that Merle was actually Anglo-Indian. Higham argues that Merle’s Tasmanian provenance was concocted by British film producer Alexander Korda’s film studio in London after Merle had arrived there from India.
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Delofski's luck changes - she encounters people who do remember Oberon from her girlhood, including a priest in Mumbai whose mother babysat her. The priest directs her to his former schoolmate, Harold Selby. Selby is noted in Higham's biography as Oberon's nephew and the man who proved she was Anglo-Indian.
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Charles Higham