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).
