Passing in Black-and-White

Akanksha Singh reviews Mayukh Sen’s “Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star.”

By Akanksha SinghMarch 4, 2025

• Film

• Biography & Autobiography

IT WAS THE performance of a lifetime. For the entirety of her existence, 1930s Hollywood star Merle Oberon hid her South Asian identity from the public. She sought coaching to do away with her Calcutta schoolgirl accent, bleached her skin, and, until her death, stayed true to a backstory manufactured for her by studio executives: she was a white woman, born to white parents in Tasmania. It was only after an eager flurry of articles about Michelle Yeoh’s 2023 Academy Award win that the white-passing Oberon was resurrected in modern memory as the first Asian to be nominated for an Academy Award.

In many ways, the truth behind Oberon’s story is one best told in black-and-white. Technicolor and special effects would do little to lift a tale whose once upon a time sets itself up for tragedy. Oberon was a child born of rape to the half-Sinhalese, half-white Constance Joy Selby in Bombay, British India. Constance Joy was 15 at the time and her rapist was her stepfather, a white British man named Arthur Thompson. Oberon’s grandmother Charlotte (Constance Joy’s mother, and a visibly South Asian woman) raised Oberon as her daughter. Constance Joy, as far as Oberon knew, was her sister.

Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star, a new biography about Oberon’s life by Mayukh Sen, opens with these traumatic scenes. With fluid pacing, Sen traces the “culture of exclusion” of the times that hobbled and channeled Oberon’s life and career. For Oberon, this exclusion started early, during her childhood in India, where Anglo-Indian people like her sat low in caste and class hierarchies. The terms used to describe this community were many, writes Sen: “Half-caste. Country-bread. Blacky-white. Chee-chee. Kutcha-butcha (half-baked). Café au lait. Eight annas (referring to the fact there were sixteen annas to a rupee).”

Makeup geeks will tell you that actresses wore green lipstick to appear red-lipped in black-and-white films. Nothing is ever as black-and-white as it seems; truth is always fickle. Fickler still, however, was Oberon’s public-facing persona. Aided by willing allies (many of whom stood to profit) and by artful film lighting, Oberon’s rise to stardom, as Sen documents, involved a convincing rendering of whiteness.

Exclusion remained a persistent force throughout Oberon’s life, beyond the racism and xenophobia of the age. Bigotry was codified: the Immigration Act of 1917 prevented South Asians (among others) from legally entering the United States, and a 1923 Supreme Court ruling made South Asian immigrants ineligible for citizenship. Similarly, industrial policies like the Hays Code, which forbade miscegenation, meant that Oberon’s mere presence on the screen as an interracial woman was taboo. “For Merle, assimilation into Hollywood’s whiteness was the most realistic path towards acceptance in the industry,” writes Sen.

At its core, this biography is about a woman whose relationship with her South Asian identity gives her an impossible hunger—for fame, for acceptance, for love: the ultimate heroine’s journey.

For a South Asian woman like myself, Oberon’s story resonates. I was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where Oberon attended La Martinière, and I now live in Mumbai (then Bombay), where Oberon was born. Geographic coincidences aside, I’d grappled with my South Asianness since early adolescence, dropping my Indian accent overnight after my parents moved the family to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and enrolled me in a British school. I remember being ashamed whenever my Nani (my mother’s mother) would visit us from India, hyperaware of her broken English (despite the fact that she spoke five other languages fluently). It’s worth noting that the book has a whole chapter dedicated to Oberon’s accent and her ongoing struggles in “iron[ing] out any straphanging vestiges of the subcontinental accent that [was] weaponized against her, pushing her farther from the land she once called home.”

Sen’s story shines throughout. The narrative is woven with surgical precision, never flaunting the obvious depth of its research. In the introduction, Sen writes that this research “involved a combination of tracking down Merle’s surviving family members, along with scouring press coverage of her—interviews, film reviews, gossip columns”—as well as “combing through her highly curated private papers,” the biographies and memoirs of her contemporaries, film archives, and immigration and travel records. Lovers of Old Hollywood will find the characters introduced here familiar: Norma Shearer (a close friend of Oberon’s), Laurence Olivier and David Niven (her co-stars in the Oscar-winning 1939 film Wuthering Heights), Boris Karloff (a quarter South Asian himself), Vivian Leigh (purportedly part South Asian), Howard Hughes, and Samuel Goldwyn. As a fan of that classic era, I was impressed by how well-rounded Sen’s portraits of these figures are.

However, it is Oberon, with a personal life that can only be described as tumultuous—several affairs, four marriages—and a commitment to her role as a white Tasmanian woman, who keeps the pages turning and the text humming. Sen clearly sympathizes with her dilemma. In describing her inability to perform an American accent in the 1938 film The Cowboy and the Lady, for instance, Sen writes: “The sole—albeit major—deficiency in her role came [from] her inability to attempt an American accent, a persistent problem […] bespeaking her lack of formal acting training.” He later notes that “accent work was never her strong suit,” as evidenced by her work in the 1948 film Berlin Express, where “she took a swing at a French accent, with disastrous results.”

Sen depicts his subject with admirable objectivity. She is well rounded enough that in her occasional villainous moments, she comes across as entirely human. Consider how, at one point, Oberon told journalists that, as a (supposed) white woman, she had a “metastasizing insecurity about the word exotic they attached to her” for playing a number of different ethnicities (a commonplace practice in Hollywood until recently). She said that the term “exotic” made her think of “burning incense,” “jasmine blooms,” and Anna May Wong, a Chinese American actress whose heritage was public knowledge. Twenty-first century readers will, of course, see these sorts of statements for what they were: a woman distancing herself from the BIPOC community by throwing another prominent BIPOC woman under the bus. But, as Sen writes in his introduction, “it is so easy to judge Merle Oberon from the smug and righteous comforts of a twenty-first-century remove, to lazily point at her by saying she let people down by pretending to be someone she wasn’t.”

And it’s this idea of who she was and wasn’t—white in public, South Asian in private—that gives the book its emotional and narrative tension. After all, the lies we tell ourselves and others define us on a basic level. Whereas I feel like an impostor for not being Indian enough, despite having lived in the country now for seven years, Oberon’s imposture involved a constant battle against being found out. By the late 1930s, that outcome seemed inevitable: black-and-white movies were “starting to die off at the expense of Technicolor,” writes Sen, and “the three-strip invention would have presented a treacherous new obstacle for a performer like Merle who had been able to use black-and-white films as a shield from scrutiny about her skin tone.”

But Oberon would stay the course, even when roles for women her age diminished (as they still often do), and a handful of South Asians would make it onto the global stage. She wore her mask until long after 1973, when she acted in her last film, even when visiting her native Tasmania, where she was honored by the lord mayor. Had the entertainment journalists of the time done any fact-checking, notes Sen, they “would have known that Merle was fudging the details” of her life.

In the book’s epilogue, Sen writes: “The deeper systemic rot that Merle battled remains alive, globally. The words forgotten and overlooked get thrown around rather indiscriminately these days, but they apply to Merle: Hers is the precise sort of story that dominant narratives seem determined to efface.” This biography offers a vigorous introduction to Oberon and, in doing so, encourages us to look at our (ironically) black-and-white world, filled with heroes and villains, with greater nuance.