Love, Queenie
Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
One of Publishers Weekly and Booklist's Best Books of 2025
“Extraordinary."—The New York Times Book Review
A beautiful reclamation of a pioneering South Asian actress captures her glittering, complicated life and lasting impact on Hollywood.
Merle Oberon made history when she was announced as a nominee for the Best Actress Oscar in 1936. Hers was a face that “launched a thousand ships,” a so-called exotic beauty who the camera loved and fans adored. Her nomination for The Dark Angel marked the first time the Academy recognized a performer of color. Almost ninety years before actress Michelle Yeoh would triumph in the same category, Oberon, born to a South Asian mother and white father in India, broke through a racial barrier—but no one knew it. Oberon was “passing” for white.
In the first biography of Oberon (1911–1979) in more than forty years, Mayukh Sen draws on family interviews and heretofore untapped archival material to capture the exceptional life of an oft-forgotten talent.
Born into poverty, Queenie Thompson dreamt of big-screen stardom. By sheer force of will, she immigrated to London in her teens and met film mogul Alexander Korda, who christened her “Merle Oberon” and invented the story that she was born to European parents in Tasmania. Her new identity was her ticket into Hollywood. When she was only in her twenties, Oberon dazzled as Cathy in Wuthering Heights opposite Laurence Olivier. Against the backdrop of Hollywood’s racially exclusionary Golden Age and the United States’s hostile immigration policy towards South Asians in the twentieth century, Oberon rose to the highest echelons of the film-world elite, all while keeping a secret that could have destroyed her career.
Tracing Oberon’s story from her Indian roots to her final days surrounded by wealth and glamor, Sen questions the demands placed on stars in life and death. His compassionate, compelling chronicle illuminates troubling truths on race, gender, and power that still resonate today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Film critic Sen (Taste Makers) delivers a moving biography of Merle Oberon (1911–1979), the first actor of color nominated for an Academy Award (Best Actress, for 1935's The Dark Angel). Growing up in poverty in Calcutta, Oberon found escape at the movies and moved to London at age 18 to become an actor. The fledgling production company London Films took interest in her but insisted she disguise her racial heritage to improve her commercial prospects, telling the press that she was born to white European parents in Tasmania. After making a name for herself as the studio's "resident so-called exotic," Oberon moved to Hollywood in 1934, where she met with cruelty and prejudice. For instance, David Niven, her Dark Angel costar and lover, refused to marry her because of her lower-class Indian background, and Laurence Olivier called her an "amateur little bitch" during one of their blistering fights on the set of 1939's Wuthering Heights. Though Sen covers the tragic elements of Oberon's story (she endured a barrage of cosmetic procedures, including skin bleaching at the behest of her studio, in an effort to overcome Hollywood's ageism and racism), he emphasizes the stirring determination she showed in scrapping her way to the film industry's upper echelon. It's a poignant account of the sacrifices that enabled an extraordinary career. Photos.
