This essay is about Merle Oberon and recent discussions of Love, Queenie, a new biography by Mayukh Sen. It is not a review of the book but a response to an amorphous recasting of Oberon as someone who consciously set out to contest Hollywood’s racist limitation of actors.
Merle Oberon, the 1930s Hollywood movie star who played famously white women like Anne Boleyn and Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, was a woman of mixed race ancestry, but she took that secret to the grave. Born in Bombay in 1911, Oberon may have been the product of rape—her mother, Constance Selby, was 14 at the time of her birth, and her white stepfather was Arthur Thompson, a British mechanical engineer who worked in Indian Railways. Merle, nicknamed “Queenie” after Queen Mary, was raised by her grandmother Charlotte Selby, whom she believed to be her mother (both Selbys were part Ceylonese/Sri Lankan). Charlotte and Merle moved to Calcutta when Merle was 6, and they lived there in poverty until they left for England in 1928. Ditching her birth name of Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson, she soon ascended to stardom, successfully hiding her ethnicity in the black and white era. If asked, she simply repeated her practiced story of being the child of dead Europeans and of having spent a childhood in Tasmania where, she claimed, her birth records were lost. The advent of colour film meant that her skin tones could no longer be disguised with tricks of lighting, and the roles and stardom began to diminish.
Still, despite the occasional swirl of rumours about her origins, Oberon was able to keep them a secret all her life, achieving considerable success but only after dangerous skin bleaching techniques meant to keep her on what was considered the respectable side of “exotic.” That she married often and well ensured that she did not disappear into faded poverty like so many women actors of the era: her first husband, the influential director Alexander Korda, was knighted during the period of their marriage so she was, for a while, Lady Korda. Clearly not suffering from any old-fashioned ideas about monogamy, she was frequently (and apparently openly) involved with famous actors (including John Wayne), and liked younger men; there are indications that her husbands and she had a mutual understanding about extra-marital relations. She appears to have spent her last years comfortably and happily in Malibu, married to the actor Robert Wolders, who was 25 years her junior. After her death in 1979, her secret was fully disclosed in the 1983 book Princess Merle: The Romantic Life of Merle Oberon, by Charles Higham and Roy Moseley.
Today, Oberon’s story and her secret are well known, but there is renewed interest in her following the publication of a new biography titled Love, Queenie, by Mayukh Sen. Sen has ties to Calcutta (now Kolkata) through his Bengali father, and this excerpt recounts his early fascination with Oberon, which began around 2009, when he was growing up in suburban New Jersey.
I have not had the chance to read Sen’s book, and I only found out about it from Anna Kodé’s New York Times piece, “A Hollywood Star With a Secret That Could Have Ended Her Career.” But I was struck by the closing section:
What stands out looking back at Merle’s oeuvre is that she was a woman of South Asian descent who starred in roles that did not center her identity. “Here was a South Asian woman playing Anne Boleyn and Cathy from ‘Wuthering Heights,’ two roles that are canonically white,” Mr. Sen said. “You can draw a direct line between Merle’s strides and those of South Asian performers like Dev Patel playing David Copperfield.”
He added: “Her career is a statement of refusal against this notion that your racial background should determine and limit the roles that were available to you.”
It’s a strange way to end an article that is, up to this point, an informed, informative, and nuanced portrayal of a woman forced to hide an essential part of her identity for the majority of her life. To write that she “starred in roles that did not center her identity” makes it seem like she had a choice in the matter. Samuel Goldwyn, the producer of Wuthering Heights (1939) was among the few who knew that his leading lady was not white, but he worked with her to keep it a secret. In 1935, when he placed her as the lead in Dark Angel, he had forced her “to undergo skin-bleaching treatments in order to appear lighter on camera,” as Kodé herself reports.
Merle Oberon did not make any “strides” as a South Asian woman playing white women for the simple reason that she was in fact a South Asian woman desperately working hard to appear as a white woman playing white women. (The term “South Asian”—which really only began to be used in the 1950s— is anachronistic here: she would have been outed as “Indian.” Or, really, just, “Hindoo” and every other possible slur.) Her career is the opposite of a “statement of refusal against this notion that your racial background should determine and limit the roles that were available to you.” That assertion creates a narrative about resistance and refusal, but it is not empowering—it simply erases a terrible and long period of Hollywood history, a time when Carol Channing had to hide her Black heritage, and Raquel Welch her Latina identity.
In an excerpt published in Slate, Sen writes about her 1935 nomination at the Academy Awards for Dark Angel (she did not win): “Within the Best Actress category, that pattern of nominating only white actresses would continue for nearly two more decades, Merle being the sole disruption until 1955 [the year Dorothy Dandridge was nominated].” But this implies that the Academy knowingly made an exception in its practice of nominating only white actresses with Oberton when in fact it nominated her as a white actress: she was not a disruption. As Sen himself writes, “So few people in that room knew the symbolic significance that her mere presence as a nominee would come to have in subsequent years.” Elsewhere, he seeks to clarify that “Oberon was no self-hating, assimilationist stooge of whiteness; instead, the social and political conditions of her era forced her to pass.”
It should not matter if Oberon had been “self-hating” or an “assimilationist stooge of whiteness”: at the time, Asians were excluded even from entry into the United States, as Kodé points out, citing the Immigration Act of 1917 that created an “Asiatic Barred Zone.” Under these circumstances, a part-Asian woman seeking a place in an industry whose very origin lay in The Birth of a Nation, and that regularly churned out films like Gone with the Wind had to do everything she could in order to survive. Whether she was “self-hating” or not is beside the point.
When Welch acted as a blonde woman in One Million Years B.C., she wasn’t refusing to be limited by her background: she was unwillingly and reluctantly making it invisible. In contrast, when Dev Patel plays David Copperfield, he does so plainly as a brown actor: the audience is expected to see him as a brown man and navigate its own sense of what it means to have a movie based on a famous Victorian text by a famous white, Victorian author centre a man who is clearly, unlike the protagonist of the famed novel, not white.
Merle Oberon’s life and career are fascinating for what they reveal about the movie industry’s dark history (no pun intended) around race, ethnicity, and representation. Kodé is right to suggest that she should be noted as the first Asian actor to have a star in Hollywood: to do so will point to Hollywood’s racist exclusion of her and force a conversation on the industry’s history on race.1Edited on March 11 to make it clear that Kodé does not state outright that Oberon should be recognised as the first Asian, but implies it. But that history is hardly over. Jennifer Beals, who is biracial, played Margo Taft, based on Merle Oberon, in the 2016 Amazon series The Last Tycoon. Like Oberon, Taft fears she will be found out in a career-ending moment. In a Vanity Fair interview at the time, Beals spoke of her surprise at finding out that, even now, several actors feel compelled to pass as white. The tyranny of whiteness continues to this day.
While we can and should acknowledge that Oberon was a part-Asian actor, there is no need to create a parallel story about her as a pathbreaker—to do so would allow Hollywood to effectively rewrite its own racist history. Consider a fictional statement like this: “Merle Oberon was the first Asian actress to be nominated for Best Actress, and her race did not matter to directors or audiences who embraced the idea of a British queen being played by a non-white woman.” Consider the more truthful one: “Merle Oberon struggled mightily to make it as a successful actress in a racist film industry, and even gained an Oscar nomination—but at the cost of hiding and constantly denying her Asian roots for nearly all her life.”
To acknowledge that her necessary subterfuge was quite possibly deeply painful (even physically) and a tremendous strain on her does not turn her into a one-dimensional victim who must now be recuperated as a hero: it is to point out that this kind of literal erasure of identity has had long-term effects on generations of actors of all ethnicities and races.
Representation matters, but so do the conditions of representation. Translating Merle Oberon’s enforced invisibility into a tale of freedom and resistance is to make the tyranny of invisibility itself invisible, yet again.
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