Hungarian filmmaker Alexander Korda gave Oberon her big break with a small but prominent role as Anne Boleyn in the 1933 film "The Private Life of Henry VIII." In 1928, she moved to France to pursue an acting career with the help of filmmaker Rex Ingram, who gave her bit roles in his films. Oberon first got into acting at age 9 when she joined the Calcutta Amateur Theatrical Society after her family moved to what is now Kolkata, India. More from NextShark: Filipino actor Dolly de Leon finds overnight success as ‘Triangle of Sadness’ snags Cannes' top honor In reality, she was born Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson to a British father and part-Sinhalese and part-Maori mother in what is now Mumbai in 1911.Ī London publicist reportedly engineered the fabrication of her new background, alleging that Oberon's birth records were destroyed in a fire and that she moved to India after her British father died. "Since my films have been circulated, several people in odd parts of Australia have bobbed up to claim me as a relation … I don’t know very much about them because my family quarreled with them some time ago." "I was born in Tasmania but left there when I was a child," Oberon shared in a 1934 interview in The West Australian. More from NextShark: 'The Joy Luck Club' Film Added to the National Film Registry 27 Years After Release Oberon claimed then that she was originally from Tasmania, an island state in Australia. Not only was casting actors of color frowned upon, but there were also self-imposed industry restrictions, known as the Hays Code, that made doing so effectively impossible. At the time, it was near impossible for non-white actors, especially women of color, to enter the industry.
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