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Merle Oberon was briefly a Hollywood star in the early days of film, whose biggest role was opposite Lawrence Olivier in Wuthering Heights. Her career fizzled after that, partly because of persistent questions about her background. Her skin was dark, her eyes were almond-shaped. No one knew at the time, but she was the first person of color to be nominated for an Oscar in the acting category — for her role in The Dark Angel (1935). She never revealed her origins, but her story is as dramatic as any Hollywood film. It’s told in author Mayukh Sen ’s new book — Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star.
Merle Oberon was born in Mumbai as Estelle Merle Thompson, but she went by the moniker Queenie. And according to her birth certificate, her mom was from Sri Lanka and her dad from England. She was raised in abject poverty during the era of British India, and due to her Anglo Indian classification, she was subject to “social penalties,” such as being ostracized by both South Asians and white people, Sen explains.
“As a member of this mixed-race community, she was mocked for her low-class status and her uncouth accent. And Anglo Indians like her, they also had few employment prospects before them. So I would say that Merle, or Queenie, as she was then known, was not quite supposed to have the life that she ended up having,” Sen says.
Oberon’s birth was actually a result of rape. Her mom, Constance, was 14 years old when she gave birth, and pretended to be her sister. To avoid scandal, Oberon’s dark-skinned Sinhalese grandmother, Charlotte, raised her.
During his research, Sen spoke to the Oberon family, who told him they don’t believe Merle Oberon ever learned the true identity of her mother. “And I found no persuasive evidence in my research and reporting that she did. And it was only after the death of both women that the family themselves learned the truth through finding Merle’s birth certificate.”
Charlotte ended up forcibly sterilizing Merle Oberon, at age 16 or 17, for fear that she’d also end up as a teenage mom too. Oberon didn’t understand what happened to her until the mid-1940s, when she desperately tried to conceive during her second marriage, Sen says. She visited doctors in the U.S. who told her she couldn’t have biological children.
Charlotte was also ambitious for her granddaughter, and the two of them traveled to London to pursue Oberon’s dream of becoming an actress. Her big break came when she was in the commissary of Elstree Studios. Sen explains, “This washed-up actress named María Corda, who is married to a film mogul named Alexander Korda, takes one look at Merle, who is then still going by Queenie Thompson, and is just mesmerized by the story of her face. She really feels that this girl is one of the most striking and beautiful girls she has ever seen. She essentially harangues her husband and says, ‘Look, you fool. There is your next big star.’ And of course, he meets with her, and he is also mesmerized by her appearance, her promise. And she is promptly signed to a contract right then and there.”
Alexander Korda’s team knew that British audiences wouldn’t be receptive to a poor, mixed-race girl from “a maligned corner of the empire” becoming a movie star, Sen says, so they had her pretend to be a child of white European gentry, born in Tasmania, Australia. They also went through different variations of a “proper” screen name, including Queenie O'Brien. O’Brien ultimately became Oberon, based on a Shakespearean character.
Whether she was able to pass as white depends on who you ask, Sen says. “In some photos of her, you can see how she was able to blend into the bevy of screen beauties of her time. But she was certainly of a more ‘olive complexion.’”
He points out that before Oberon came to Hollywood in the mid-1930s, women like Greta Garbo and Anna May Wong were typed as “exotic,” and Oberon’s appearance disrupted that pattern. Then during her Hollywood debut, many executives and filmmakers didn't know what to do with her, so they put a ton of grease paint on her so she could look “exotic” as possible.
It was easier to pass as white during the black-and-white filmmaking era, Sen notes, and when technicolor came, she was dropped from The Garden of Allah, which was supposed to be her first color film after her historic Oscar nomination for The Dark Angel.
In Hollywood, Samuel Goldwyn knew Oberon’s past and took her under his wing. He was from Eastern Europe and knew what it took to assimilate and tamp down his differences to reach Hollywood success, Sen says. He saw Oberon as similarly ambitious and talented, with celebrity potential.
“He wiped the grease paint off, and he pasteurized her image so that she could embody the quintessential English rose for American audiences. And this was a stark contrast and departure from her prior roles in British cinema, in which she was known for playing … women of French, Spanish, even Japanese heritage,” Sen explains.
Oberon then hung out with studio executives, dated Clark Gable and David Niven, and became best friends with Oscar winner Norma Shearer, who was among the few people she confided in and revealed her true mixed racial background.
The peak of Sen’s career was Wuthering Heights. She landed the role of Kathy, who ironically was supposed to embody British whiteness, largely thanks to Goldwyn’s advocacy. However, Sen points out, others didn’t believe in Oberon, and thought the role should’ve gone instead to Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis.
“Merle, despite that, she soldiered on, and she gave a performance for the ages. But Wuthering Heights, when it came out in 1939, was not really a financial success. It would take a few re-releases for it to really turn a profit. And so Goldwyn’s final attempt to solidify her stardom proved to be a financial miscalculation,” he says.
Oberon’s career petered out in the 1940s, but Sen says that was when she gave some of her best and underseen work.
Hiding her identity so much had deep psychological ramifications too, Sen says. When Oberon was able to obtain U.S. citizenship, she didn’t do so partly due to fear. “She built her trust with the public on a certain reputational pretense that she was this Tasmanian-born European actress, right? So revealing that truth would have constituted a breach of that implicit, unspoken contract she had with her audience, right?”
However, she later found ways to engage with Indian culture, he says, like wearing dresses made of saris to public events, boasting about curry to newspapers, and agreeing to play Mahatma Gandhi's wife in a biopic of the activist (but that version of the film was ultimately nixed). “I was just so struck in learning that, and seeing her tell the press that this role would represent a new star from her. And so I really wonder what could have been had she lived longer,” Sen says. |
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