Merle Oberon hid her ethnicity in Hollywood—a new biography looks at the reasons why

If you’re a fan of the Golden Age of Hollywood, you may know Merle Oberon from her role as Cathy in Wuthering Heights. Or perhaps you’ve seen her Oscar-nominated performance as Kitty Vane in The Dark Angel. But what you may not have known was that Merle Oberon was South Asian—born into poverty in Bombay, raised in Calcutta, and arriving in Hollywood via England along with a new name and backstory.

Merle Oberon’s identity as an Anglo-Indian was not known by many until her death. Although there was much speculation about her “exotic” looks, the official line in Hollywood at the time was that she was born to white parents in Tasmania, and then raised briefly in India. It’s easy to look back now and assume that she made an easy decision to pass as white to get ahead. But a new biography, Love, Queenie, sets out to tell a more complete and nuanced story. I spoke with the author, Mayukh Sen, about what’s missing from our understanding of Merle’s life, and why it’s so relevant today.

In Love, Queenie, you contextualize Merle Oberon’s story—in particular the reasoning behind why she hid her South Asian heritage—against the historical backdrop of racism, immigration law, and Hollywood film codes. What would you most like people to understand about Merle after reading your book?

So much of the received wisdom about Merle Oberon amongst my fellow Asian Americans (and the Asian diaspora), at least from where I’ve been sitting, has hinged on this fallacy that her life was one of great ease and privilege because she “passed” as white. This line of thinking often elides the political, cultural, and social agitations that made passing one of the few choices she had after fleeing the poverty and racism of her childhood in India. It was a survival strategy, not a cynical ploy to get ahead in the world. (Erroneous claims from previous biographical treatments of her, repeated in various articles and podcasts about her, have abetted such misunderstandings; I sought to correct some of those myths.) 

Rendering Merle’s story with proper context became especially exigent for me as I saw the dispiriting coverage of her in 2023, when Michelle Yeoh became the second Best Actress nominee of Asian descent at the Oscars, eighty-seven years after Merle. Some outlets hesitated to acknowledge Merle as Asian; others saw it fit to skim over her name entirely. But I want readers to understand that she arrived in America in a time when not only Hollywood enforced restrictions on depictions of interracial romance through the Hays Code, but also when the country imposed a wholesale ban on immigration from India while also preventing Indian immigrants from obtaining citizenship. These conditions shaped her life in tangible ways many might not be privy to today. It’s my hope that readers across generations, young and old, will see Merle Oberon’s story in a more compassionate light after reading my book and perhaps even be prompted to reevaluate her work as an actress. Once you understand the enormous roadblocks she faced in her journey, you appreciate her as an artist more.

For those unfamiliar with the Anglo-Indian community in British India, what type of ostracism did Merle Oberon and her family face in her early years? Was life much better for Anglo-Indians in the UK?

Conversations with Merle’s surviving family from India made clear to me that she, along with her mother (who, being half-Sinhalese and half-white, also considered herself part of the Anglo-Indian community, even if her South Asian roots were in what is today Sri Lanka), found herself in a subordinate position in British India because of her mixed-race background. Merle and her family lived in abject poverty and, like many other Anglo-Indians, faced rejection from both white Britons and other Indians (or South Asians—especially those belonging to higher castes) for their perceived racial impurity. They were mocked for what their aggressors believed to be the crassness of their accents. They were referred to by slurs. I don’t mean to paint a distorted picture of racial subjugation. Some members of the Anglo-Indian community who aligned themselves with the colonizer could benefit from such proximity—many Anglo-Indian men found government-sanctioned work on the railways, for example. Though racial passing was occasionally a tactic some in the Anglo-Indian community relied on to relieve themselves of harsh social penalties—Uther Charlton-Stevens writes about this in his informative 2022 book Anglo-India and the End of Empire—Merle’s family made clear to me that she was largely unable to “pass” and camouflage herself within the broader white, British community in India. 

However, upon traveling abroad to the United Kingdom—a place that was a haven for Anglo-Indians who felt alienated in British India during the yawning years of the empire—she could slough off any stigma a little more easily. The scholar Rochelle Almeida writes about this in great detail in her illuminating book Britain's Anglo-Indians: The Invisibility of Assimilation (2017); many of those early Anglo-Indian migrants blended in because “their Indian antecedents were either deliberately buried with their Indian pasts or lost gradually as they assimilated into British society,” Almeida writes. This was certainly the case for Merle. Though she still had to contend with poverty in her early years in Britain, coupled with the need for an accent coach, she had an entirely different set of possibilities—and challenges—before her abroad, outside the context of British India. 

Merle kept her heritage secret till her death, even from her children. You describe her longing to return to India at several points, and the way she made small moves to keep a part of her identity, like wearing saris when it was fashionable in the US. Do you think there was ever a scenario in which she’d have felt safe divulging her true background?

I’ve wrestled with this question since finishing my book, and you’re not the first to pose it to me. It’s such an intriguing one. The understanding I came to have of Merle is that she was eager, and desperate, to escape the unforgiving material and social conditions she encountered in her childhood, and that she would do nothing to forfeit any security once she obtained it. (Hers is as much a story about class as it is about race.) That remained true of her throughout her entire life, even into her later years. As such, I’m not terribly confident she would’ve ever gathered the courage to tell the world who she was, even if America was opening itself up to aspects of her birth country’s culture by the time she died in 1979. That dance you mention, in which she vacillated between self-acceptance of her roots and public rejection of them, was one she knew so well that I’m not convinced she’d be able to reprogram herself as she approached old age.

One might be tempted to think of a figure like Carol Channing, who divulged her Black ancestry at the turn of the millennium after years of hiding it from the public eye. (There’s also a chance that she could have been outed involuntarily like Rock Hudson, whose widely-publicized AIDS diagnosis more or less pushed him out of the closet.) But for Merle, the lie created for her by studio publicists back in 1932—one that involved not only concealment of her racial identity, but also a fictitious birthplace—was so involved that unraveling it herself would have sacrificed that cocoon of safety she’d built for herself. I’d love to be wrong about this, but I just don’t think Merle would have put so much on the line in the final years of her life. 

Immigration and citizenship legislation are in the news once again. Do you think Merle’s story has any special relevance today?

I certainly didn’t anticipate this would be the case when I began writing my book, but Merle’s story should very much function as a cautionary tale for where this country is headed if unchecked animus paves the way for draconian immigration and citizenship laws as it did back in Merle’s time. When Merle first came to this country, America’s restrictions on immigration from India, coupled with the inability of Indian immigrants to obtain citizenship, were the result of years of bigoted rhetoric and violence against Indian immigrants in America. I fear a version of that is currently happening before our very eyes, as certain groups are vilified to such a degree that their movements in this country are at risk of being restricted, their ability to stay here compromised on the basis of their racial identity or birthplace. 

The entertainment industry has also begun to kiss the ring to appease the ruling administration’s distaste for anything that’s perceived to deal with diversity—which is remarkably similar to the contraction we saw nearly a century ago when the Hays Code went into effect. This could very well create an ecosystem in which people will be forced into some form of hiding, as Merle was, simply in order to survive in this country. I hope my book will reach people across the political spectrum—especially, I’d say, those who sit across the political aisle from me—and help them understand, in plainspoken and human terms, how unjust it is for anyone to go through what Merle had to endure just to make a stable life for herself in America. 

You’ve been a fan of Merle Oberon since discovering her films as a teenager. What are your favorite performances of hers, and what makes them stand out to you?

Wuthering Heights (1939) was the gateway for me, as it was for many moviegoers and Merle; it is justly celebrated as a classic. But I’m partial to two films she made in the years directly after that: ’Til We Meet Again (1940) and Lydia (1941). In the former, she plays a woman dying of a heart condition who boards a cruise ship and falls in love with a man who is, unbeknownst to her, a convicted criminal—the two of them keep their secrets from each other. I don’t have to over-explain the parallels that role has to Merle’s own life offscreen—that might be a blunt, superficial reading of why she works so well in this part—but there’s a level of honesty to her performance in that film that I find so moving. In Lydia, meanwhile, she plays a woman who falls in love with a carousel of men throughout her life, only to end up alone as she reflects on her singledom in old age. To me, this is Merle’s most demonstrative performance. It gives her so many colors to play—she’s an insolent, bratty young woman; a brooding romantic heroine; a remorseful spinster; a survivor. She nails them all. This film really shows you what Merle was capable of if given the chance, and she carries it on her back. She was, in other words, a star.