Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star By: Mayukh Sen

Author: Mayukh Sen

A beautiful reclamation of a pioneering South Asian actress captures her glittering, complicated life and lasting impact on Hollywood.

Merle Oberon attained Hollywood immortality with a nomination for a Best Leading Actress Oscar for her role in the 1936 film The Dark Angel. It was the first time a performer of color had received an acting nomination at the Academy Awards, but because Oberon concealed her South Asian identity throughout her lifetime and “passed” for white, very few people knew it. In Love, Queenie, the first biography in more than forty years of the India-born actress, Mayukh Sen draws on family interviews and previously untapped archival research to animate the Wuthering Heights star’s hard-won journey to fame. From an upbringing in poverty, she rose to the highest echelons of the film-world elite during Hollywood’s racially exclusionary Golden Age. A major biography of an often-overlooked talent, Love, Queenie empathetically captures one woman’s story while illuminating truths on race, gender, and power that still resonate today.