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Lot Essay
THE PROVENANCE
Estelle Merle O'Brien Tompson was born in Bombay in 1911, grew up in Calcutta and later moved to London. In 1931, she met and later married Hungarian-born Alexander Korda who was becoming a dynamic force in the British cinema. He cast her as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII. Samuel Goldwyn recognized her beauty and talent and featured her in The Dark Angel in 1935, for which she received an Academy Award nomination. In 1938, she won her true fame playing opposite Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights. The Korda marriage was shortlived and Oberon moved permanently to a large country estate in Bel-Air, California where she furnished her home with traditional English and French 18th and 19th century antiques (S.Berg, 'Merle Oberon', Architectural Digest, April 1990). Her Georgian black and gilt- japanned bureau-cabinet held the record for years as the most expensive piece of English furniture after it was sold by the Pierpont Morgan Library, Christie's, New York, 17 October 1981, lot 161 ($946,000).
Estelle Merle O'Brien Tompson was born in Bombay in 1911, grew up in Calcutta and later moved to London. In 1931, she met and later married Hungarian-born Alexander Korda who was becoming a dynamic force in the British cinema. He cast her as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII. Samuel Goldwyn recognized her beauty and talent and featured her in The Dark Angel in 1935, for which she received an Academy Award nomination. In 1938, she won her true fame playing opposite Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights. The Korda marriage was shortlived and Oberon moved permanently to a large country estate in Bel-Air, California where she furnished her home with traditional English and French 18th and 19th century antiques (S.Berg, 'Merle Oberon', Architectural Digest, April 1990). Her Georgian black and gilt- japanned bureau-cabinet held the record for years as the most expensive piece of English furniture after it was sold by the Pierpont Morgan Library, Christie's, New York, 17 October 1981, lot 161 ($946,000).