Merle Oberon – Face of Mystery | Bob Casey | 2008 [SC]

For most of her career, Merle Oberon — one of Hollywood's leading actresses of the 1930s and 1940s, nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Dark Angel (1935) and starring opposite Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights (1939) — claimed to have been born in Hobart, Tasmania, to white British parents, and that her birth records had been destroyed in a fire.

The truth, revealed after her death in 1979, was that she was born in Bombay in British India, of mixed South Asian heritage — a background she concealed throughout her career because Hollywood's racial politics of the era made it professionally dangerous. Tasmania was chosen as a cover story precisely because it was remote and its records were difficult to verify from California.

But the Tasmanian story didn't simply evaporate. An alternative local tradition holds that Oberon was actually born on Tasmania's east coast — the daughter of a Chinese woman named Lottie Chintock and a local businessman — and that her journey to India came later. Tasmanians who believe this version point to local witnesses, a midwife's granddaughter, and a photograph of a woman who may or may not be Lottie.

Bob Casey examines both claims and the evidence for each. Casey draws a conclusion — but it's one many Tasmanians still refuse to accept.

At 115 pages with colour illustrations, this is a compact and readable account of one of the most contested biographical mysteries in Australian cultural history.

BOOK DETAILS

Softcover.

115 pages.

Colour illustrations.

Published 2008.

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