I WAS amazed to read that the Hollywood actress Merle Oberon, who starred opposite Sir Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights, was the daughter of a Darlington railway engineer called Arthur Thompson.
Apparently, during her lifetime she had always maintained she was born in Tasmania to a British Army officer when, in fact, she was born Estelle Merle Thompson in Bombay, in 1911.
Her mother, who was only 12, was the daughter of the woman that her father was living with.
This has all been revealed by a project between the British Library and an ancestry website.
The woman who lived with her father raised her and, consequently, Merle was led to believe her real mother was her sister.
What a tangled web worthy of a Hollywood script.
Tina Lupton, Coatham Mundeville.
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