Why Merle Oberon kept her Asian identity secret

Golden Age film star Merle Oberon comes alive in a breezy new biography, sparked in part by the 2023 news that she was half Asian, a secret she kept all her life.

When Michelle Yeoh was nominated for the lead actress Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” news outlets reported that she was the first Asian woman to receive the honor — then revised their stories, adding that Oberon had been there first, with 1935’s “The Dark Angel.” (Yeoh won; Oberon lost to Bette Davis.)

The truth about Oberon, who died in 1979, had been known since the 1980s, first in a poorly regarded biography and then in a “sleazy” novel by her onetime nephew, Michael Korda. In “Love, Queenie,” writer Mayukh Sen cheerfully reclaims her story, narrating it with sensitivity and verve.

“As a teenager, I had enormous empathy for Merle Oberon’s struggle,” Sen writes. “Most gay boys I knew tended to fawn over other divas of the era, but my chosen idol was Merle.” Sen both understood Oberon’s desire to hide a secret and recognized a trace of her South Asian accent. He hopes that this tale will prompt people to revisit her filmography.

For the most part, the book is written as if living alongside Oberon during her lifetime, giving emotional heft to her sometimes difficult choices. But a few of the complexities of her secret origins have to be sorted out first.

Film fans who encountered Oberon in the 1930s — “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” “The Private Life of Henry VIII” — heard she was a British actress born in Tasmania, raised by her British officer father and his wife in India until adolescence and then brought to England.

The truth is that she was born Estelle Merle Thompson in 1911 in what is now Mumbai. Her mother’s side was from what is now Sri Lanka, and her father was an unidentified British soldier. They were very poor, and being mixed race in her community was difficult.

And although she didn’t know it, Estelle was misled about her parentage — her elder sister was actually her mother; the mother who raised them both was her grandmother. Maybe there is something about this kind of family secret that fuels actors — the same thing happened to Jack Nicholson. It was Estelle’s grandmother, Sen tells us, who dubbed her Queenie.

As soon as she could, Queenie leveraged her beauty to get out. She got a ticket to London from a smitten suitor, bringing her grandmother along. Arriving in England in 1929, Queenie fumbled around on the edges of the entertainment business, hoping to be an actor. She wasn’t good, but she was beautiful and extraordinarily determined. A few friends from that era felt she used them; when people met her darker-skinned mother (grandmother), Queenie told them she was her maid.

Soon director Alexander Korda took her under his wing, and she adopted the name Merle Oberon. Merle tried to lose her Indian accent. Korda’s team cooked up a new origin story, picking Tasmania as her birthplace because it was so distant and obscure. It was simple and common then to begin a movie career with a new identity; it’s hard to imagine that anyone would have understood how significant and indelible this particular constructed erasure would be to Merle’s life and legacy.

A brief engagement with powerful Hollywood executive Joseph Schenck led to her getting a contract in the U.S. She was able to split her time between England and Hollywood; the unique arrangement indicated that studios on both sides of the Atlantic believed she was a superstar.

By 1939, Oberon was at a peak. She starred in “Wuthering Heights,” her best-remembered film, with Laurence Olivier. She married Korda and he showered her with jewels. They bought a luxurious home in Los Angeles.

Sen shows us another part of the story. Oberon was miserable acting with Olivier. He had wanted his wife, Vivien Leigh, to get the part, and took that out on Oberon. She fell so ill she had to be hospitalized.

Oberon was sitting pretty with Korda, but she was not as in love as he was and carried on at least one public affair. Korda went back to England to support the war effort, and Oberon did the same in the U.S..

In L.A., Oberon enjoyed the sunny outdoors and tanned, getting much darker than her colleagues. Her dark skin was a problem at work, sometimes causing filming delays. Directors and producers coached her to use whitening creams. Of course, some contained toxins, leading to skin issues. On the one hand, she was appearing in Max Factor makeup ads; on the other, her skin condition got so bad that, years later, a cinematographer would invent a blasting beautifying light, which is still used, that’s named for her (reader, she married him).

In “Love, Queenie,” writer Mayukh Sen cheerfully reclaims Merle Oberon’s story, narrating it with sensitivity and verve.

(C.J. Marteran)

The reason this ambitious beauty deserves another look now, Sen reminds us, is that all along, her true identity put her in peril. He explains the extensive rules that had kept South Asians out of the U.S. — without her false identity, Oberon might not have even been granted entry. On top of that, Hollywood’s Hays Code prohibited miscegenation — no interracial romance whatsoever. Oberon’s career was built on her being able to have a romance with white leading men. Is it any wonder she kept her origins secret?

What had at first seemed like a savvy business decision to try to be a star in both England and the U.S. didn’t quite work out that way. During the studio era, Oberon wound up without the solid base that would have given her plum roles and scripts. She fought the pressure of waning celebrity, but it was not easy to be a 40-something beauty queen in Hollywood.

In the mid-1950s, Oberon married a wealthy Italian industrialist, Bruno Pagliai, based in Mexico. Oberon and Pagliai built a stunning villa in Acapulco, and she shifted to hosting star-studded parties covered by Vogue and Life magazine. They adopted two children — orphaned Italian siblings. Many years before, in India, Oberon’s grandmother had taken her to get an operation so she wouldn’t get pregnant. That initial cruel caution, or a later attempt to reverse it, meant Oberon could not have children of her own.

By the Swinging ’60s, Oberon tanned and grew her hair long but kept her identity secret. Rules and social mores were changing, but she reacted by leaning backward. She was a Republican who supported Gov. Ronald Reagan. She produced and starred in the 1973 film “Interval” that was widely criticized for its outdated approach to romance. However, Oberon wasn’t completely old-fashioned — she divorced again and married her co-star, Robert Wolders, who was 25 years her junior.

Oberon had too many romances, too many films, too many unfortunate twists of fate to mention them all here. Today, we ask why she never took the opportunity to reveal her true past. Sen asks us not to judge but to look clearly at the racism she faced, the work she did and the fullness of her impossible story.