New book 'Love, Queenie' chronicles life of trailblazing South Asian actress Merle Oberon

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: As the first Asian and only South Asian actress to be nominated for a best actress Oscar, Merle Oberon’s place in the pantheon of cinema is historic, but it came with enormous sacrifice. For decades, Oberon had to hide her race to stay working in film.

I recently spoke with writer Mayukh Sen whose new book, “Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star,” chronicles Oberon’s rise to fame, her groundbreaking career, and eventual fade from the spotlight.

It’s part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Mayukh, welcome to the “News Hour.” Thanks for being here.

Mayukh Sen, Author, “Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star”: Thank you for having me, Amna.

Amna Nawaz: So before we dive into the details of Merle Oberon’s life, tell me how the book came to be. I mean, what was it about her and her story that made you want to dig in?

Mayukh Sen: So I have always been fascinated by Merle Oberon ever since I first encountered her, which was all the way back in the summer of 2009.

I was a rising senior in high school and I was obsessed with the Oscars. And I learned that she had been the first Asian actress who was nominated for an Academy Award for acting all the way back in 1936. And then I learned that she had grown up in the city of Kolkata, which is where my father was from.

And so, ever since then, I have really wanted to tell her story. And there hasn’t been a proper biography of her in over 40 years.

Amna Nawaz: Yes.

Mayukh Sen: So I told myself, you know what, I think it’s time for me to just take this project on and try to do her story justice.

Amna Nawaz: And the story that most people knew about her as she was making her way through Hollywood was that she was a British actress, that she was born in Tasmania, that she was raised in India, then brought to England. That’s the story she told people.

What was the truth about her life?

Mayukh Sen: So something that emerged in the years after her death in 1979 was that Merle Oberon, despite posturing before the public eye as this white Tasmanian-born woman, was in fact born into poverty in the city that was then known as Bombay, now Mumbai, India, to a South Asian mother and a white father.

And she spent the first 18 years of her life in India living through poverty. And it was only after she went to England in 1929 that this fictitious backstory was created for her by studios that she was actually a white woman born in Tasmania. And that is a lie that would stick with her throughout the entirety of her life, at least publicly.

Amna Nawaz: What did it mean to grow up mixed-race in India in the early 1900s?

Mayukh Sen: Yes.

So Merle Oberon, she was born as Queenie Thomson in India, right? And many Anglo-Indians, Merle Oberon included, grew up having to deal with intense social discrimination because the fact that they were essentially neither here nor there. They didn’t easily assimilate into the wider South Asian population and they were also almost always rejected by white British folks.

Amna Nawaz: And the context for when she comes to the United States, as you point out in the book, is, again, one of real overt racism towards South Asians, right?

There was an immigration act that barred South Asians from entry. Hollywood had a code in place that barred any interracial romance on screen. You write in the book that her identity was a secret she guarded with her life.

What would have happened if people had found out?

Mayukh Sen: So her career would have been completely destroyed had people known that she was in fact a mixed-race girl who was born into poverty in India.

The Hays Code, which was instituted in 1934, which is coincidentally the same year that Merle Oberon first arrives in America, for example, one of its edicts barred the depiction of interracial romance, which was defined in the text as being between black and white races, but produced such a chilling effect that it also affected the opportunities for non-Black people of color, including Merle Oberon.

So had people known that she was actually mixed race and South Asian, she would not have been able to play any leading roles.

Amna Nawaz: And she does land some roles, right? She stars opposite of Laurence Olivier as Cathy in “Wuthering Heights,” as Anne Boleyn in “The Private Life of Henry VIII.”

How does she hide her identity? What does she have to do?

Mayukh Sen: I mean, it requires enormous sacrifice. First, she’s armed with this backstory that was created for her all the way back in 1932 by a company called London Films. They’re the ones that, you know what, we’re going to give you this fictitious backstory that will essentially deflect any sort of curiosity or speculation about your heritage, right?

And alongside that, she has to endure so many terrible and torturous, frankly, beauty regimens. When she was making the 1935 film “The Dark Angel,” which is the film for which she received her historic best actress nomination, she had to undergo an entire day of skin bleaching because studio crew essentially thought that she was too dark.

And this is something that she had to go through routinely as she was making films in Hollywood.

Amna Nawaz: What kind of impact did that take on her, not just on her career, but her personally, psychologically?

Mayukh Sen: I mean, I think that it really incurred such a deep psychological cost on her.

And what I found as I was writing my book and really spending a lot of time with the archives and her personal papers is that she was essentially in this dance between having to deny who she was in public while in private still keeping in touch with her family members from India.

And that sort of tension, I think, really reached a boiling point later in her life.

Amna Nawaz: You write also in the book that the words forgotten and overlooked get thrown around rather indiscriminately these days, but they apply to Merle. Why do you say that? What do you think her legacy is today?

Mayukh Sen: When it comes to conversations about Asian identity in America, so often I find people fixate on East Asian or Southeast Asian identity, not necessarily South Asian identity, which is what Merle’s story represents.

Alongside that, I would say the fact that she’s mixed race has sometimes disqualified her from these conversations about representation. And then, of course, you add to the fact that she passed as white and she had to deny her heritage.

But I do find that, in terms of Merle’s legacy, what she was really fighting for, whether she was conscious of it or not, was an entertainment ecosystem in which people, especially performers of color, did not have the roles that were available to them dictated purely by their race.

This was a South Asian woman who grew up in poverty, who went on to play Cathy in “Wuthering Heights,” this canonically white role.

Merle Oberon, Actress: Heathcliff, make the world stop right here.

Mayukh Sen: She was a leading lady and a box office draw and a total star in the ’30s and ’40s. And I do think that there’s so many South Asian performers working today who are indebted to her, whether they realize it or not.

Amna Nawaz: The book is “Love, Queenie.” The author is Mayukh Sen.

Thank you so much for being here. It’s such a pleasure to speak with you.

Mayukh Sen: Thank you, Amna.