Merle Oberon

Merle Oberon (1911–1979) was born Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson in Bombay (now Mumbai), India. In 1932 she signed a five-year contract with Alexander Korda's company London Films, and made her breakthrough one year later in the role of Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). During the 1930s she appeared in The Private Life of Don Juan (1934), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1935), These Three (1936), and the unreleased film I, Claudius (1937). Her American film debut was in Folies Bergère de Paris in 1935. That same year she was nominated by the Academy for her performance in The Dark Angel. Oberon's greatest screen success came four years later, when she starred as Cathy in Wuthering Heights (1939).

In 1939 Oberon married her mentor, Alexander Korda. They were divorced in 1945, and she subsequently wed cinematographer Lucien Ballard. During the 1940s she appeared in such films as Lydia (1941), A Song to Remember (1945), This Love of Ours (1945), Temptation (1946), Night Song (1948), and Berlin Express (1948). Oberon was less active in the 1950s; her major screen appearances were in Desiree (1945) and Deep in My Heart (1954). Divorced from Ballard, Oberon married industrialist Bruno Pagliai in 1957. The Pagliais played host to many international figures at their home in Acapulco, Mexico, including Prince Charles, Baron Guy de Rothschild, Noël Coward, Clare Booth Luce, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Lynda Bird Johnson, Bing Crosby, and the Duke of Edinburgh (Prince Philip). In the 1960s Oberon's most notable films were Of Love and Desire (1963) and Hotel (1967). Oberon produced and starred in her final film, Interval (1973), opposite Robert Wolders, whom she married in 1975, having divorced Pagliai in 1973.