Wuthering Heights actress Merle Oberon's secret that she took to the grave...

[dipsydoodle]

Wuthering Heights actress Merle Oberon's secret that she took to the grave... her sister was her mother who gave birth aged 12

She was one of the great stars of Hollywood’s golden age and shared a kiss with Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights.

But mystery has always surrounded Merle Oberon’s early life, not least because of the version of events given by the actress herself.

She claimed she was born in Tasmania and then moved to India to live with her aristocratic godparents after her distinguished father died in a hunting accident. Her Who’s Who entry in the 1970s listed her birthplace as Tasmania and her father as a British Army officer.

Now, however, records have been published that confirm for the first time that she was actually born in India – and that the woman she knew as her sister was really her mother.

A project between the British Library and ancestry website findmypast.co.uk has published records from the time of the Raj online, including Oberon’s birth certificate.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2549874/Wuthering-Heights-actress-Merle-Oberons-secret-took-grave-sister-mother-gave-birth-aged-12.html

[xchrom]

1. loved her

[Freddie]

2. Same story: Jack Nicholson and Bobby Darin

All of them born to teenagers and raised by grandparents who passed them off as a "change of life baby." I imagine Freud has a field day with this one.

[Sheldon Cooper]

4. Ted Bundy, too.

[okaawhatever]

7. Ditto Eric Clapton nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Not actually new - an Australian documentary from 2002:

After a false lead or two, I found Harry Selby in Toronto. Here I discovered completely new information about Merle’s birth. Although Harry Selby had told Charles Higham that he was Merle’s nephew and had found Merle’s birth certificate in Mumbai, it seems Harry had held information back from the biographer. What he had in fact discovered when he found Merle’s birth certificate deep in the bowels of the Indian government records office, was a deeply guarded family secret of which even he was unaware: Merle Oberon was not his aunt, she was his sister.

It seems Harry’s mother Constance Selby had given birth to Merle when she was 15 and her mother had taken the baby and raised Merle as her own preventing Merle’s real mother from claiming her. When Harry learned that his mother was Merle’s mother and not her sister, it helped him to understand why his mother always fretted for Merle. Merle, however, never directly acknowledged the Selby family, except by sending them small amounts of money from time to time. When Harry tried to visit Merle, now famous and living in Los Angeles, she refused to acknowledge him.

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/documentaries/stories/s657300.htm

[avebury]

5. Wuthering Heights just started on TCM. nt

[Le Taz Hot]

6. Bobby Darin's situation was the same

except his mother wasn't 12.

Yowza!