Love, Queenie by Mayukh Sen

Love, Queenie:

Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star

By Mayukh Sen

WW Norton 2025

“How do you capture the truth of someone who was an unreliable narrator of her own life, who lied so often about herself for survival?” asks Mayukh Sen as a cautious preamble to his engagingly feisty new biography of Hollywood star Merle Oberon, Love, Queenie (“Queenie” being the actress’s childhood nickname).  With The Dark Angel in 1935, Oberon, born in what was then Bombay, India, became the first South Asian actress nominated for a Best Leading Actress Oscar, and Love, Queenie is her first full-dress biography in nearly half a century, since 1983’s Princess Merle by Charles Higham and Roy Moseley.

Princess Merle did well in bookstores, but for Sen it’s acted less as an inspiration and more as a cautionary tale. “As I became aware of the extent of Higham’s questionable methods,” he writes, “that prior biography became less a guidepost than a text for me to refute.” There isn’t as much straight-up refutation as Oberon’s film fans might expect, but Sen has done a respectable amount of original research and interviewing, and he’s paid more technical attention to Oberon’s skills as a Hollywood operator and an actress than it would have occurred to Higham and Moseley to do. Sen worries that in the year’s since Oberon’s death in 1979, “the fixation on the agony of a life spent in hiding has occluded respect for her craft,” and Love, Queenie does as much to correct this imbalance as any popular-press account could do for an actress who couldn’t afford to turn down stinkers and is now remembered for only a small handful of choice roles.

Sen is a bit prone to breathless melodrama; much of this book reads like the script for a movie in which Oberon would have been excellent:

Hollywood’s homegrown sorority of actresses, all of them white, harbored mistrust about whether this brown vamp was really from Australia. As a result, Merle had little social life. Parties, when she managed to score invites to them, were dances of humiliation. She spent all of Christmas crying, thrown back into the seclusion of a childhood in India feeling unwanted because she thought nobody wanted to be friends with a mixed-race girl.

But that mention of “agony” is, if anything, an understatement. Oberon in her younger years, hungry for excellence, stardom, and fame, was a savvy surveyor of Hollywood’s culture, and she saw with perfect vision the casting fate that awaited her if her mixed ancestry became common knowledge. She invented a story about being from Australia, and all her life she acceded to the barbaric skin-whitening regimes imposed on her by directors, studio bosses, and lovers, all designed, as Sen puts it, to transform her “from a coppery foreigner to the embodiment of Hays-era purity.”

Oberon’s personal life growing up was a nightmare out of the mind of the Marquis de Sade (or the Old Testament). Her mother was actually her grandmother, and the person she was told was her half-sister was actually her mother. A garish number of her older male relatives were rapacious sexual predators (perhaps explaining her own predilection for much younger lovers once she herself was older?), and all of this psychological chaos was before she then had to deal with the disastrous impact her ancestry might have had on her career were it generally known. “The fact that Merle Oberon was Asian at all was a secret she guarded with her life,” Sen writes, and for once he’s not grandstanding.  This was less a choice than a necessity, and it came at great psychic cost to her.”  Added to this psychic cost was the physical torment her beauty rituals: “She brushed her hair for an interminable forty-five minutes,” Sen reports, “and every morning she masked her face with the pale scum that formed overnight atop an oyster sprinkled with lemon juice.”

Throughout every up and down of Oberon’s career, Sen pays her – and his readers – the implicit compliment of not turning his subject into a saint. Oberon supported Nixon’s presidential campaign, thought the women’s liberation was “nonsense,” and had a typically crochety view of Sacheen Littlefeather accepting Marlon Brando’s 1973 Oscar for The Godfather and reading his statement of protest about Hollywood’s mistreatment of indigenous Americans: “It’s wrong to put down the Oscars, just as it’s wrong to put down America.”

The disenchantment was mutual. As Sen thoroughly chronicles, Oberon’s final movie, 1973’s Interval, was seen as a nostalgic vanity project. Movie critics, with the rabid rudeness that’s endemic to their sick profession, attacked not only the movie’s creaky, outdated storytelling style but also, in cruel asides guaranteed to wound the fading star, Oberon’s looks.

Love, Queenie is earnestly affectionate but pulls none of these punches, which makes it both bracing and refreshing reading, the year’s first genuinely worthwhile movie star biography. All previous studies of this troubled, fascinating figure can be readily retired.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News