For some, her name might sound familiar; for others, not at all. But for a short time in the 1930s-40s, Merle Oberon, aka Estelle Merle "Queenie" Thompson, was a film star among her peers. She worked or was friends with many, including Vivian Leigh, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, and David Niven, to name a few.

To the general public, she was simply another Caucasian actress they saw in movies. In truth, the US public of that time might never have accepted her had they known she was South Asian, born of a British/Sinhalese mother and a white British father in the Indian city of Bombay, now known as Mumbai.

In Love, Queenie, author Mayukh Sen, an admitted life-long fan of the actress, further lifts the veil on her made-up life, retraces her steps through India, then London, and finally the US, where by then Oberon was "passing" as white European so she could act and have the career she loved. 

Sen’s book is only the second biography of Oberon, her fame having become more obscure than that of her contemporaries. The first, Princess Merle: The Romantic Life of Merle Oberon, by Charles Higham, was written in 1983, a few years after the actress’s death, and exposed her racial heritage. 

With empathy, in light of changing times, and with the full participation of her birth and marital families, Sen puts together a more cohesive version of her life with less criticism and sensationalism. While throughout the book Sen makes it clear that not every movie role was a good one or, a good choice, he rarely criticizes Oberon’s choices in her private life but instead provides reasoning behind each of her many heartbreaks and professional disappointments.

Sen details Oberon’s journey through schools where she was bullied because of her racial background, making her way into amateur community theatre in India while still in her early teens. He writes in unromanticized detail about UK and US immigration laws of the time and how, if Oberon had difficulty getting to London, such laws in the US (that would allow her to get to Hollywood) were worse, with racial prejudice extremely high. 

According to Sen’s research, the Immigration Act of 1917 was a challenge, as it denied entry to Asians from South Asia. Those already in the US were in danger of having their citizenship revoked. For a while, Oberon was in a quandary as to how she was going to make those geographic leaps.  

She eventually gets to London, and there she meets Alexander Korda, the director and owner of London Studios, who offers her a contract and molds her the way the studio system did in America, putting her in a slew of films. (As film history fans probably know, Korda would eventually become her husband. His nephew, Michael, would later write a fictionalized account of his aunt’s life, which became a 1980s TV miniseries. By the time Korda actually takes his production company to Hollywood, Oberon is already a star in Europe.

In Hollywood, Oberon would make the first adaptation of Wuthering Heights in 1935 with Sir Laurence Olivier and receive an Academy Award nomination. Sadly, it would be the only nomination in her career, one in which she could never say that she was the first South Asian to be honored in such a prestigious way. 

Unlike Hattie McDaniel, who would go on to win the Oscar for Gone With the Wind, Oberon did not have to sit in the back of the room. She received the full star treatment, arriving with her date, Clark Gable. Oberon’s glamorous, exotic good looks granted her privileges in Hollywood, and according to Sen, she was both very aware and equally aware that her true origins could be found out. 

In Love, Queenie, her biographer not only discusses her love affairs and marriages but also goes into the dynamics of each pairing. In Korda, she found a mentor and protector, but also felt insecure that the Jewish director was a class above her. In her subsequent romances and marriages, she found sex appeal, money, and status. 

The book also reveals little fascinating nuggets, such as that her first love was British actor David Niven; that Oberon met African-American actress Ethel Waters in the Piccadilly area of London in the 1920s; and was encouraged by Waters to "Go to America, take the chance." Despite her anxiety over her own racial background, Oberon allegedly "fell" for one of the Black musicians at the same club, and her passing for white wasn’t the only family secret, her legendary temperament, and the invention of her screen name. 

Like many biographers striving to get in all the details, Sen may have missed some of her story, but this book proves it’s good to revisit Merle, and the story itself does have a bittersweet ending. Perhaps Merle Oberon would be pleased to know that Mindy Kaling, Padma Lakshimi, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Frieda Pinto, Lilly Singh, and so many actors and others of South Asian descent do not have to hide who they are.