Was Merle Oberon Born in Australia?

Question: Was Merle Oberon Born in Australia?

Answer: In 1978, the glamorous movie star and screen legend Merle Oberon visited Tasmania, Australia, for a homecoming reception in Hobart hosted by the lord mayor.

A year later, the 68-year-old star was dead.

Her obituaries made much of the fact that Merle Oberon was born in Tasmania (birth state of another famous Hollywood star, Errol Flynn). Born Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson, Oberon had always said she was born in St Helens on the east coast of Tasmania.

Merle Oberon (1911-1979), who starred in such films as The Private Lives of Henry VIII, A Song to Remember, Wuthering Heights and Love and Desire, is said to have moved to India with her family when she was seven. She went to school in Bombay and Calcutta and performed with the Calcutta Amateur Theatrical Society.

When she was 17, she moved to England, worked for London Film Productions, and became the star she was to be known all over the world.

But was she born in Australia?

A number of Tasmanians continue to insist that Oberon was born in the Australian island state. They point out the house where she was born, say who the midwife and doctor were, and name the Tasmanian family as well as the beautiful Chinese-Australian, Lottie Chintook, who is said to be the movie star's mother.

In 1983, the Australian film writer Charles Higham claimed that Oberon was Anglo-Indian and born in Bombay.

In the movie documentary The Trouble with Merle, screened at the 2002 Sydney Film Festival and later shown on Australian television, filmmaker Maree Delofsky investigates Merle Oberon's lineage and comes to the conclusion that the actress had not been born in Tasmania at all. Oberon is believed to have created the fiction of being Australian-born as she thought no one would want to employ an Indian actress.

Postscript: There's another story saying Merle Oberon later claimed to have actually been born on a ship passing Tasmania.