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Merle Oberon: Hobart Council
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Merle Oberon was one of the biggest movie stars of the 1930s and 1940s. Studio publicists said she was born into a wealthy family in Hobart, Tasmania - Australia's island state.
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A star in the 1930s and '40s who played opposite Gary Cooper and Laurence Olivier, Oberon was believed for years to have been Tasmanian. Although it was later revealed she was born in India, she attended a welcome-home reception in Hobart shortly before her death in 1979.
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To them, Oberon was the illegitimate daughter of a Chinese hotel worker, Lottie Chintock, who lived in the north-east and gave birth to her in Hobart. Lottie was forced to relinquish her daughter, who was taken to India by Indian silk merchants or, says another version, by a travelling troupe of actors called O'Brien (hence Oberon). Another story has her taken to India by the cousin of her mother's employer.
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Charles Higham suggests in The Trouble with Merle that it was on the urging of Merle’s fourth husband, the much younger Robert Wolders, that she came to Hobart. Robert wanted to see her birthplace. Had she not told him the truth?
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