'Love, Queenie' tells a story of passing for white in 1930s Hollywood

Host Deepa Fernandes speaks with Mayukh Sen about his new book, "Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star." The book tells how Oberon, who was born in India and whose mother was half-Sinhalese, had to hide that identity to find success as an actress.

By Mayukh Sen

She was unlike any star I’d ever seen. It wasn’t only her look, resembling no Crawford, Davis, or Garbo I recognized from that era: the inkjet hair, the charmingly crooked snaggletooth that would jut out whenever she smiled, the bronze skin that reminded me of my own. It was her voice. She spoke clipped and practiced English that, on occasion, would slip, revealing a hint of the city that had made her. I knew that accent well: It was the same I’d heard among my father’s Bengali family from Kolkata, the city where she’d grown up. This connection made my response to her feel more real, more true, than any I’d felt toward other performers from that period.

I was a teenager when I first came across Merle Oberon as Cathy in William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939), the film for which she is arguably most remembered today. It was around 2009 or so, and I was a senior in high school in suburban New Jersey. By that point, she had been dead for three decades, but I felt bound to her by city and skin. I knew the broad contours of her biography: that she had been born into poverty as a mixed-­race, Anglo-­Indian girl in British India in the early twentieth century. That, upon immigrating to London as a teenager, she ditched the name Queenie Thompson and within a matter of years reinvented herself as Merle Oberon, becoming a star of Anglo-­American cinema under that name. That she concealed her maternal South Asian lineage and passed for white because the prejudices of the era demanded she do so, maintaining until her 1979 death the studio-­constructed fiction that she’d been born to European parents in Tasmania.

As a teenager, I had enormous empathy for Merle Oberon’s struggle. Most gay boys I knew tended to fawn over other divas of the era, but my chosen idol was Merle: I 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. Her ascent was also meaningful to me as a South Asian, for Merle found purchase in a world where our likes were rarely acknowledged. That alone made her so much more than her tragedy. I knew, even then, that projecting a performer’s offscreen biography onto their onscreen work was a simplistic way to read art. But when I saw Merle on screen, I saw the hurt in her gaze. I also felt an admiration for her survival, a disbelief that she could summon the will to make art despite her pain.

After embracing Merle Oberon’s majesty early in my cinephilia during the late aughts, I was dismayed to learn that mine was a minority opinion. The narrator of the great James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) discounted her as “a nothing actress” with a “disquieting resemblance to an egg,” reflecting a general consensus. David Thomson, a writer whose work fomented my ambition to enter the profession of film criticism, lamented that “she was often a dull actress” in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (originally A Biographical Dictionary of Cinema), which I considered a holy book. Some were even more savage. An academic who ran a blog dedicated to the Academy Awards—­back when there was a cottage industry of what I and many others called “Oscar bloggers”—­dismissed her: “What use was Merle Oberon, really? Her face has a hard, flat quality onscreen that seems to repel the audience’s identification, and she seems insufficiently open to the actors around her.” It stung to see her entire existence as an actor written off so snidely by people I considered tastemakers.

Life took me away from writing about film and toward other subjects, but my mind always returned to Merle Oberon. In the few times Merle’s name did manage to permeate the zeitgeist, I saw her regarded with cruelty. People, both within and outside the South Asian diaspora, sullied her as a self-­hating race traitor whose considerable achievements were better left unacknowledged. These critics seemed to have little understanding of what it was like to be Anglo-­Indian in South Asia during the early twentieth century, how the studio system in Hollywood’s Golden Age left actresses like Merle with next to no agency, how restrictive US immigration legislation against South Asians made her entire existence on American soil precarious. Her story, I thought, clamored for a South Asian perspective that contextualized her condition, her choices, and her eventual triumphs. I vowed that one day, if the tools were available to me and the public interest was sufficient—­I would write a book on her life.

Excerpted from "Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star." Copyright (c) 2025 by Mayukh Sen. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.