Merle Oberon

TCM is celebrating her this month, there was a new bio out this year that looks intriguing and I just watched her in a melodramatic mood in The Dark Angel, her only Academy Award nomination, and really enjoyed it. Looking forward to peeking into that bio and watching some more things in TCM. Particularly intrigued to see how she fares opposite ILX favorite George Brent.

was interested to learn about her family background a few years ago when michelle yeoh won an oscar and publications had to issue corrections clarifying that yeoh was the first "openly asian" best actress winner.

I've seen her in non-descript roles and most famously in Wuthering Heights where she's inscrutably miscast (so is Olivier, but he does he can).

*what he can

I watched These Three the other night, the first filming of The Children’s Hour, and thought she was really lovely. Other than that and Wuthering Heights I don’t think I’ve seen her in anything else?

Still haven't seen it, but I recorded it from TCM last week.

I'm inclined to group her with Linda Darnell in that, while limited, she's a better actress than usually given credit for. Both of them probably quite a bit better than, say, Hedy Lamarr.

Although Experiment Perilous is better than Berlin Express, which you should still watch when it comes up later in the month, I think.

Morbius weighs in on That Uncertain Feeling: "i have a confession to make to you, baron: you are a CROOK!": the ERNST LUBITSCH poll

Laura is her best, though she's wonderfully creepy in Leave Her to Heaven

duh, why am I confused Merle Oberon with Gene Tierney? nm

(xp) For zing users, the post is on June 13, 2017

She made another movie with Olivier right before Wuthering Heights called The Divorce of Lady X that they often run on TCM which I've never properly watched.

Scarlet Pimpernel is the way, her and Leslie Howard.

I remember finding out MO was south asian and once i heard it i couldnt unhear it. That Uncertain Feeling is a weird lubitsch but she’s a great straight guy in it

was interested to learn about her family background a few years ago when michelle yeoh won an oscar and publications had to issue corrections clarifying that yeoh was the first "openly asian" best actress winner.

― jaymc, Wednesday, December 17, 2025 10:02 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

correction: oberon was the first asian best actress *nominee* (yeoh was the second).

Also the "openly" part

i mean, that's what people wrote

Second person with Asian ancestry of either gender to be nominated was apparently Ben Kingsley:
https://www.tcm.com/articles/now-playing-newsletter/59799/star-of-the-month-merle-oberon

i mean, that's🕸 what🕸 people🕸 wrote🕸

Can't remember if people even knew about his ethnic background until that movie.

https://www.thelist.com/810522/the-real-reason-ben-kingsley-changed-his-name/

Dev Patel and Riz Ahmed got nominations and maybe that's it.

Steven Yeun, off the top of my head

Miyoshi Umeki won Best Supporting Actress for Sayonara.

duh, why am I confused Merle Oberon with Gene Tierney? nm

Somehow they both managed to steer clear of Gene Markey.

Eddie Muller intro to Berlin Express talks about how instead of the expected RKO goto guy Nick Musuraca they used her then-husband Lucien Ballard as the DP. Ballard had a special (hand-held?) he called The Obi (after her) to hide the scars on her face. I had always thought these scars were from the car crash during the troubled production of I, Claudius but apparently it was from some drug injection for a virus, which medicine caused pustules to break out and then scar her face.

I wish they were showing the documentary about I, Claudius called The Epic That Never Was, that thing is amazing.

The light is spelled The Obie, I guess.

That TCM link has a lot of this info.

The Epic That Never Was is on YouTube in a few places.

Apparently her paramour David Niven was just like his character in Bonjour Tristesse.

I, Claudius car crash did not damage her face but did result in a nasty concussion and near death experience.

Sabu finally shows up in the bio as a comparison point.

Here's a tl:dr article that also seems to have an interview: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/feature-articles/merle-oberon-she-walked-in-beauty/

This is a pretty good overview: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-61079732

Links to this https://www.mic.com/articles/168949/the-surprising-story-of-merle-oberon-the-only-indian-actress-to-be-nominated-for-an-oscar, which seems to have the proper count for Asian and Indian award winners

And this, a review of the Australian documentary about her, which contains a lot of detail about the length Tasmanians went to claim her as their own: https://variety.com/2002/film/reviews/the-trouble-with-merle-1200547709/

I remember finding out MO was south asian and once i heard it i couldnt unhear it.

― Its big ball chunky time (Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved), Wednesday, December 17, 2025 1:30 PM (two days ago)

Does this mean you hear a South Asian accent in her speaking voice?

Something I read said that when she was tired or overstressed such an accent could emerge and somebody like Charles Laughton would make fun of her, but there's maybe just a hint of it on film, hard to know if it's really there or imagined.

Yeah, I've been trying to listen to her closely and I think I hear an Indian accent but my ears aren't as attuned to this a Brit's would be.

Wonder if anyone has seen or read Queenie. I myself have kept my distance and in any case neither the book not the miniseries is readily available.

not=nor

From this year's bio:

After embracing Merle Oberon’s majesty early in my cinephilia during the late aughts, I was dismayed to learn that mine was a minority opinion. The narrator of the great James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) discounted her as “a nothing actress” with a “disquieting resemblance to an egg,” reflecting a general consensus. David Thomson, a writer whose work fomented my ambition to enter the profession of film criticism, lamented that “she was often a dull actress” in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (originally A Biographical Dictionary of Cinema), which I considered a holy book. Some were even more savage. An academic who ran a blog dedicated to the Academy Awards—back when there was a cottage industry of what I and many others called “Oscar bloggers”—dismissed her: “What use was Merle Oberon, really? Her face has a hard, flat quality onscreen that seems to repel the audience’s identification, and she seems insufficiently open to the actors around her.” It stung to see her entire existence as an actor written off so snidely by people I considered tastemakers.

Does this mean you hear a South Asian accent in her speaking voice?

― Josefa, Friday, December 19, 2025 9:19 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes.

Having seen just a few of her films I would concede that she projects a bit of a solipsistic vibe. The Hedy Lamarr comparison is interesting because it would be hard to make a case that Lamarr is the better actress, but maybe her presence is more sympathetic somehow. We could throw Joan Bennett in here who seemingly occupied a similar niche in the Hollywood hierarchy but was arguably the best actress of the three.

https://halfcastewoman.substack.com/p/love-queenie

Of those three, Joan Bennett is clearly the one who has been taken most seriously over the years.

If only for the Fritz Lang films

Maybe I will just be overfamiliar and start referring to him as Niv.

These last few posts are confusing as hell but I approve of your new username

David Niven and Merle were an item for a long time. When it began she was the biggest star in England and he was a nobody, just a guy who liked to hang around with actors and make funny faces. She coached him in acting and got him all his early jobs and basically paid for everything at the time, according to the very specific sources I mentioned.

Maybe it's all BS though

Good thing I didn't pay for that book

This guy was the author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Munn

Was wondering how he got such great dish

Maybe the book by Robert Morley's son is more reliable.

Oberon had first met David in London in the early thirties when she was a hostess at the Cafe de Paris, living with Hutch, the great cabaret pianist, and David was on his nightclub rounds. A couple of years later, Laurence Olivier (who was, of course, to join them in Wuthering Heights) recalled a meeting at Korda’s Denham Studios where Merle was then filming: ‘She had this young man with her, who kept putting on silly voices and seemed terribly ill at ease with people who were already making their names as actors, but she was very sweet with him and then by the time we all got to Hollywood she was the love of his life. I don’t think he was ever the most faithful of lovers, even to her, but she was very good with him and I do think she helped him a lot, both socially and professionally. He was never going to be a dedicated actor–he couldn’t have done a stage classic to save his life–but he had a lot of charm and was very good at sport, and Merley loved all that about him.’

^From The Other Side of the Moon: The Life of David Niven, by Sheridan Morley.

About the other author: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/25/michael-munn-biographer-interview-tim-adams

Also looked in Niv: The Authorised Biography of David Niven, by Graham Lord. The nature of their relationship was still correctly described in the first book, even if the fabulist liked to make up interviews that never happened.

I do hope this is a bit clearer now

Yes, thank you. I read the first of David Niven's series of memoirs, The Moon's a Balloon, but can't remember what he said about Merle Oberon. I think it's generally believed that Niven tells a lot of tall tales in those books.

He didn't name her in that book. Instead he referred to her as a "Great Big Star."

And yes, he was known for telling stories, of varying degrees of truthfulness.

So Lydia is pretty wild at the start, where it has a distinct Citizen Kane-ish feel to it. But it gets sappier as it goes along, Merle always ping-ponging between ecstatic joy and despair.

Still have to watch that one. It was made the same year as Citizen Kane, 1941, as David Bordwell points out.

A little surprised to see Walter Brennan in These Three.

Managed to watch Affectionately Yours before it went away. Far from a masterpiece but still worth watching for a few reasons.

It's basically a budget remake of His Girl Friday.

With Roz Russell split in two in a transporter beam accident, with the reporter part– and her hat– becoming Rita Hayworth, and the ex-wife part becoming Merle Oberon.

Ralph Bellamy in the Ralph Bellamy role!

And...Dennis Morgan in the Cary Grant role.

Not only is he no Cary Grant, he's not even George Brent.#onethread

Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen from WentGone With the Wind, along with a character actor whose name I forget playing some kind of bizarre Turkish character, provide some problematic comic relief.

Dennis Morgan's performance is like if they plucked Russell Wade directly from his Val Lewton films (#onethread) and when he showed up for day one of shooting they finally informed him it was going to be a comedy so just ham it up.

The Private Life of Don Juan is leaving TCM, although it remains on Criterion. Maybe I will at least have a peek at what Alicia Malone has to say.

Some interesting stuff about how Korda discovered Miklós Rózsa in the Ben Mankiewicz intro to Lydia.

Watching one of Merle Oberon's RKO pictures, one that has a terrible reputation, and it's turning out better than expected. Noticed Cat People screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen in the credits and tempted to think that it's him working his magic.#onethread

She sings for a few seconds! Probably short enough that it's not a ghost singer.

As a teenager, Queenie sang and danced in the Calcutta Amateur Theatrical Society.

Dan Andrews basically says the famous first line of a Dylan song.

Arrgh, Dana Andrews

I understand prunes gave him the runes.

That was Night Song, which is somewhat similar to Magnificent Obsession.

Most of it is a four-hander performed by the two leads along with Hoagy Carmichael and Ethel Barrymore, both of whose shtick is enjoyable, until the big concert sequence at the end, which is also good.

So I can safely recommend giving that a chance, unlike the one I am trying to finish now, Stanley Donen's bloated MGM Sid Romberg biopic Deep in My Heart.

This thing is really only worth turning on for some of the myriad one-off MGM musical guest performances, such as the one by Ann Miller who just showed up and delivered the goods, dancing up a storm in a bright red flapper's dress.

For Merle-watching purposes she is barely even in it. Although right now she's flirting with with a young gentleman from North Carolina by putting on a Southern accent that is even worse than her French accent in Berlin Express, if that's possible.

José Ferrer is annoying in the lead, frantically mugging to fill up the space.

And most of the tunes are lackluster as well, apart from "Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise."

Just hanging on now waiting for the arrival of Cyd Charisse, dubbed by Carol Richards, of course. #onethread

Seems like neither Stanley Donen nor Roger Edens cared that much about this project except as a money spinner MGM musical biopic, the last of four, and as Edens first film as lead producer, I think.

Cyd/Carol! Nice to see again after recently sitting through that other bloatfest Silk Stockings.

And Howard Keel wakes things up again with "My Maryland."

Do you have a blog or Substack? I'd love to read these bullet points cohered into an Oberon essay.

Ah, now Merle is doing the dying and crying routine she did so well in 'Til We Meet Again, only in color and without that understated George Brent magic to bounce off of.

Do you have a blog or Substack? I'd love to read these bullet points cohered into an Oberon essay.

Well, that last one was grueling. Will have to rest up before I attempt something like Hotel.