The Pain of Passing

On Mayukh Sen's 'Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star'

Merle Oberon, c. 1935, Photograph, Getty Images

Mayukh Sen’s scrupulous and moving biography, Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star, considers the Golden Age actress’ ambivalence toward her white and Sinhalese ancestry through a decolonial lens. In 1936, Merle Oberon, then 24, became the first performer of color and Asian descent to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. But Oberon never got to revel in her achievement’s historic importance. To succeed within a far more racist and xenophobic environment, Oberon took pains to pass for white. “This was less a choice than a necessity,” Sen writes, “and it came at great psychic cost to her.”

Love, Queenie invites readers to give Oberon’s nomination, gumption, and filmography commensurate recognition. To those who fault Oberon for denying her maternal South Asian lineage, Sen offers context. As black-and-white cinematography gave way to technicolor and television and as Hollywood’s studio system disintegrated, Oberon’s few Asian contemporaries struggled to sustain acting careers. In keeping with anti-miscegenation laws in most of the United States, American film studios of Oberon’s era eschewed depictions of romance between white actors and performers of color. For Oberon, disclosing her identity would have forfeited her leading lady roles. She would have also lost advertising campaigns with Lux Toilet Soap and Max Factor selling her fair complexion. Given the Immigration Act of 1917 that barred South Asians from legal entry into the United States, Oberon would have also risked deportation. As the United States and Britain pushed colonial projects, Oberon overcame poverty, spousal abuse, and fickle industry standards to fulfill her childhood ambition to act. In attending to how Oberon exercised her agency within the constraints she faced, Sen celebrates Oberon’s craft, charting her artistic evolution and limitations and how all of that withholding must have created stores of emotion that informed Oberon’s expression before the camera.

Oberon was born into a performance. She grew up believing that her Sinhalese maternal grandmother Charlotte was her mother and that her biological mother Constance was her half-sister. Constance gave birth to Estelle Merle Thompson in British India’s Bombay when she was 15 years old after her white British stepfather, Oberon’s biological father, raped her. Charlotte reconstituted their family to circumvent scandal. Perhaps aspiring to a royal status that would lift them from indigence in Bombay and later Calcutta, Charlotte would call her granddaughter “my Queen.” Charlotte’s endearment led to Oberon going by Queenie Thompson. That Queenie would receive the British title of Lady through her first husband’s knighthood in 1942 speaks to her astonishing arc. Queenie never knew her father, who withdrew to England after her birth. By the time Queenie charmed a British man into buying her a ticket to London in 1929, Constance had married and been leading a separate life. Sen, with his eye for resonant details, notes that Constance took and safeguarded a pair of gold hoops Queenie had worn when she was three years old. The earrings were a memento of the talented film-star daughter Constance could not claim as her own.

In London, Queenie and Charlotte constructed another charade. In order to live together and tone up Queenie’s whiteness, Charlotte would act as Queenie’s maid. To support herself and Charlotte, Queenie may have relied on sex work while she pursued a film career. Casting calls turned her away, but Queenie persevered as one bit part led to another. In 1932, Alexander Korda, the founder of a fledgling film studio, gave her a contract. A fan of the British Empire and Oberon’s future first spouse, Korda also revised Queenie’s origin story. Blotting out her Bombay birth, Korda reinvented Queenie as Merle Oberon, born in Tasmania to wealthy white European parents. As a consequence, Oberon could not even fully mourn Charlotte’s death in 1937, and true to Oberon’s studio biography, obituaries reduced Charlotte to a white woman who had married a British man in Tasmania.

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Oberon’s elan embosses Sen’s easy and engaging prose. “But she was determined to make a silk purse of this throwaway role,” Sen writes of Oberon’s resolve to embody Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII, a 1933 British film. “If I don’t, they may get rid of me in a sub-title the way they got rid of Catherine of Aragon,” Oberon quipped to a journalist, referencing the film’s omission of Henry VIII’s first wife. During shooting for her first Hollywood film Folies Bergère de Paris, Merle “was dazzled by the mechanics of American filmmaking,” including her “bungalow that doubled as a dressing-room — and with wheels!” 23-year-old Merle seemed to bubble with excitement when she told a journalist, “It is like living in an Aladdin’s lamp palace all the time.”

In the United States, Oberon tried to redirect speculation about her heritage. While Oberon’s looks lent an air of mystery that helped establish her career in England, they confused American audiences. Upon the 1935 release of Folies Bergère de Paris, the word “Oriental ossified around her name,” threatening her career prospects. That year, as Oberon prepared to play a small-town English girl for The Dark Angel, for which she would earn the Best Actress nomination, her ethnic ambiguity drew doubts about her casting. To discard her oriental label and assert her whiteness, Oberon told a Los Angeles Times reporter what the word “exotic” meant to her: “Smell of burning incense. Jasmine blossoms. Or heaps of gardenias all over the place. Pretty sticky. And a long, slinky black velvet dress.” As disturbing as Oberon’s absorption of white supremacy sounds today, Edward Said’s Orientalism would not shift the conversation about the Occident’s perceptions of the East for another 43 years. But there was more cause for dismay. Exemplifying how colonialism divides potential alliances, Oberon told another journalist that the word “exotic” made her think of actresses like Anna May Wong, one of Oberon’s few Asian contemporaries in Hollywood. Wong’s public identification as Asian had cost her the lead role for a Chinese character in a 1931 Hollywood film because a white actor took on the male lead. Meanwhile, in 1931’s London, then 20-year-old Queenie had told an actress friend, a “moon-faced British debutante,” that she wanted so much to be the greatest star in the world that “I don’t care what I do or who I have to sleep with to get there.” Unlike her white actress friend, Queenie could not afford to heed any discomfort she may have felt about having sex to advance her career. Merle Oberon on the cusp of Hollywood stardom was that much more unlikely to let mere facts of birth get in her way, not when her indeterminate features allowed her opportunities that would remain unavailable to Wong.

Training his lens at the oppression of the era, Sen situates Oberon’s choices within her prejudicial context. Reporters would write about Oberon’s “olive” skin and “almond” eyes “as if they were items on a cheeseboard.” When Oberon’s skin tanned from sun exposure, The Dark Angel crew demanded that she undergo a day of bleaching treatments, which may have subjected her to toxic mercury levels. With the advent of color cinematography, film crew members and reviewers complained about how the technology exposed Merle’s complexion. After much concern about miscasting a fresh-faced, dainty girl of the English countryside with “an Asiatic adventuress,” as one moviegoer put it, a reviewer of The Dark Angel wrote, “Merle Oberon plays her Occidental role as well as she plays Oriental roles, and is quite as beautiful and alluring.” It would be ahistorical to denounce Oberon’s decision to distance herself from what Wong represented as much as she could. “This was the psychological price,” Sen writes, “of Merle’s conditioning at the hands of the burgeoning star system in Hollywood: it warped her self-image.”

Sen neither excuses nor condemns Oberon’s capacity for cruelty, as when she called for the firing of an assistant on set for bringing her the wrong pair of gloves. He acknowledges Oberon’s appalling behavior with sensitivity to how “dual mandates of keeping this secret about her racial identity and navigating this high-pressure environment could lead to outbursts that Merle could not control.” Oberon lacked the ability to cultivate a private coherent understanding of her identity because she did not even have all of the pieces. She did not know, for example, that at Charlotte’s direction, a doctor performed a sterilization procedure on Queenie when she was 16 years old. Oberon’s fears of arousing suspicion around her true racial and ethnic identity may have also led her in a conservative political direction. She told a reporter that she thought women’s liberation was “nonsense.” Her support of Richard Nixon’s reelection in 1972 put her out of fashion with younger progressive actresses. In the last year of her life, 1979, Oberon’s minimal social activities included throwing her support behind Ronald Reagan’s run for president.

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Sen’s most decolonial framing with Love, Queenie is to focus on Oberon’s filmography. Rather than minimize her life to tragedy and trauma, Sen centers her creative choices. His writing sings when he observes Oberon’s acting, from her “talent for spry comedy, which reflected her generally jocular offscreen personality,” to her discomfort with accent work from having to subdue her Anglo-Indian lilt, to how “the entirety of her being . . . could flood her performances.” “She’s the kind of actress I’d watch in anything,” Sen writes, “even in swill.” With a light touch, Sen draws parallels between what Merle had to bottle up and the feelings that spilled from her on screen. In 1939’s Wuthering Heights, Oberon’s claim to fame, her portrayal of the English heroine Catherine Earnshaw’s inability to divulge her love for a dark-skinned man reflected Merle’s own “lifelong struggle to accept who she was and where she came from.” In 1941’s Lydia, 30-year-old Oberon even played a spinster. Although Lydia’s character was “fundamentally inscrutable” in the script, “it was a testament to Merle’s talent that she was able to give Lydia’s romantic quandaries specificity.” In 1954’s Désirée, 43-year-old Oberon played Empress Josephine Bonaparte opposite Marlon Brando’s Napoleon. Much like Oberon, Josephine concealed her Caribbean birthplace and was unable to bear children. As Sen writes, Oberon “found unexpected depth in a woman who felt powerless against time, limning this part with a tragic undercurrent that she could only have brought to it at this phase of her life.”

For all of his discussion of how reporters described Oberon as “exotic,” “sloe-eyed,” or, amazingly, a “girl bride of Genghis Khan,” Sen might have offered more of his perspective on Oberon’s beauty, “so arresting,” going beyond his appreciation of her “licorice” hair, “the charmingly crooked snaggletooth that would jut out whenever she smiled, the bronze skin that reminded” him of his own. While Oberon’s contrast with the “pineapple,” “banana,” and “wheatish” blondes of her day seems obvious, to what extent did Oberon’s features, gestures, and posture reflect conventional beauty standards?

Apart from sharing Oberon’s South Asian heritage, Sen “understood, as a teen who was still coming to terms with his sexuality, what it meant to hide a part of yourself for your safety, to secure a life where you might want to make your dreams possible.” Oberon’s inner turmoil is palpable throughout Sen’s portrait. She cried upon arrival in Tasmania for a reception honoring her in 1978. In one of the book’s most touching passages, Oberon allowed herself an instance of honesty with a stranger. Like a seam that could no longer withstand tension, Oberon told a driver helping her up steps at the reception, “I was actually born in India.” Inside the reception room, Oberon grasped at her old ruse, saying that she had been born on a ship as it passed by Tasmania; she appeared distressed to the point of passing out or feeling faint. Oberon’s body seemed to buckle under her lifelong performance of whiteness.

Oberon often contradicted herself when she recited Korda’s Tasmanian tale. Her attachment to India, however, persisted. She indicated India as her birthplace on the card she presented at her first auditions in London and on her 1934 passenger manifest to New York. On a 1974 cruise that docked in Bombay, where she hesitated to disembark, Oberon bought a sari. Later, she asked a designer to refashion the sari into a gown, which she wore in 1976, at the American Film Institute’s tribute to her director for Wuthering Heights. Oberon looked resplendent in the empire waist dress. Her subtle reference to India may explain her radiance in pictures from the event. In 1941, Oberon received a letter from Constance. A single mother who struggled to provide for her four kids following Queenie, Constance would go to see Oberon’s movies in Bombay cinemas. Oberon addressed her presumed half-sister with “My dearest Joy,” promising to arrange monthly payments, which she did. In the book’s most poignant moment, “Merle tempered this transactional message with a sign of affection,” closing out the letter with “Love, Queenie.” Thanks to Sen’s insightful, compassionate, and historically-attuned narrative skill, the significance of Oberon’s signature is legible beyond the page.

Sumaiya Aftab Ahmed is a writer and lawyer in Queens, New York. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Volume 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere.