Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star

by Mayukh Sen, Sharmila Devar (Narrator)

Merle Oberon made history when she was announced as a nominee for the Best Actress Oscar in 1936. Her nomination marked the first time the Academy recognized a performer of color. Oberon, born to a South Asian mother and white father, broke through a racial barrier—but no one knew it. Oberon was "passing" for white.

In the first biography of Oberon in more than forty years, Mayukh Sen draws on family interviews and untapped archival material to capture the life of an oft-forgotten talent. Born into poverty, Queenie Thompson dreamt of big-screen stardom. By sheer force of will, she immigrated to London in her teens and met film mogul Alexander Korda, who christened her "Merle Oberon." Her new identity was her ticket into Hollywood. When she was in her twenties, Oberon dazzled as Cathy in Wuthering Heights opposite Laurence Olivier. Against the backdrop of Hollywood's racially exclusionary Golden Age and the United States's hostile immigration policy towards South Asians in the twentieth century, Oberon rose to the highest echelons of the film-world elite.

Tracing Oberon's story from her Indian roots to her final days surrounded by wealth and glamor, Sen questions the demands placed on stars in life and death. His compassionate, compelling chronicle illuminates troubling truths on race, gender, and power that still resonate today.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Film, Audiobook, Biography Memoir, Race

Audible Audio

First published March 4, 2025

About the author

Mayukh Sen is the James Beard Award-winning author of Taste Makers (2021) and Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star (2025). He is a 2025 Fellow at New America, and his writing has been anthologized in four editions of The Best American Food and Travel Writing. He teaches journalism at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had vaguely heard of Merle Oberon before. Not for her career as an actress but for the fact that she was South Asian but passed as white til the day she died. In fact I was pretty sure I hadn't seen anything she had been in but I was wrong, I've seen her in The Lodger(good film).

Merle's legacy has been tarnish by the fact that she passed as white. As someone who has a deep fascination with "passing " and even has a family member who did pass and many others who could, I have intense empathy for her.

Merle Oberon was the first actor/actress of color to be nominated for an Oscar in 1936. Her Best Actress nomination would be the only nomination in that category by a person of color for 2 decades and it would be 87 years before another actress of East, Southeast or South Asian descent would be nominated and win the Best Actress Oscar Michelle Yeoh. Unfortunately because of the fact that she wasn't open about her race she doesn't get her proper respect.

I don't always like the people I read biographies about but I did really like her. Merle seemed like a genuinely lovely person and she was beautiful. The fact that the press harped on her plastic surgery in such a mean way made me so mad. She married 4x and had many love affairs, like a true Hollywood legend should. She had something done to her against her will that I find completely unforgivable but she did forgive that person.

Overall I highly recommend this book and I think you should watch her movies as well. This is the second book about a famous Asian actress from Old Hollywood (Anna May Wong) and I enjoy both of them.

If you know any other forgotten or unsung Actor/Actresses of color from Classic Hollywood I should read about let me know.

[Vivek Tejuja · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are certain women whose faces feel like secrets. Not in the way secrets are whispered but in the way they’re worn, defiantly, like armour. Merle Oberon was one of them. And for a gay boy growing up in the Bombay of the '90s, where Marine Drive shimmered with promises we weren’t allowed to make out loud, she felt like someone I could understand, long before I had the words to explain why.

I was maybe twelve when I first saw her on TCM, tucked between the midnight Bette Davis reruns and the icy elegance of Joan Crawford. Merle shimmered not just with beauty, though of course that, but with the unmistakable glint of someone who was hiding in plain sight. And if you were queer in Bombay in the '90s, you knew all about hiding. You learned early. You practiced daily. It was a city of glitter and grime, of freedom and fear, where you could strut down Marine Drive in your most dramatic shirt from Fashion Street and still flinch when the word “chhakka” rang out like a slap.

In Love, Queenie, Mayukh Sen captures the impossible geometry of Merle Oberon, a woman who bent light, lineage, and legacy to her will, and in doing so, erased parts of herself she was told not to love. Born in Bombay, just like me, she had to vanish to be seen. She said she was from Tasmania. She bleached her copper skin. She wasn't even aware that her "sister" was her mother, and the woman she called her mother was her grandmother. And while it’s easy to judge that now, Sen’s genius is in refusing to.

This isn’t just biography, it’s resurrection, it’s reckoning, it’s high camp mixed with high compassion. Sen, a queer brown writer himself, doesn’t flinch from the grotesqueries of Merle’s life: the oyster-lemon skin routines, the sexual violence, the Hollywood racism so thick it needed its own studio lot. But neither does he canonise her. Merle, like all our greatest divas, was difficult. She had bad politics and beautiful cheekbones. She was both sacred and suspect, the kind of woman who’d light a cigarette with disdain and tell you women’s liberation was “nonsense” while plotting her next cinematic conquest.

She would’ve been right at home with Rekha, reclining in Kanjeevaram silks, her past a blur of rumour and reinvention. Or with Sridevi, whose eyes could flood a screen with longing while she quietly battled the ache of being a woman moulded by men. These were the women who mothered me from the screen, not with lullabies, but with eyeliner. Their stories weren’t meant to be aspirational; they were cautionary tales wrapped in chiffon. And I loved them for it.

The Bombay I grew up in didn’t have room for boys like me unless we danced at weddings or made people laugh. So we found ourselves in VHS tapes and late-night screenings, in the smug, perfect arch of a Crawford eyebrow, or in Merle’s haunted gaze as she tries not to cry on camera. We saw ourselves in women who had to lie to live, who understood that beauty could be both escape and prison.

Love, Queenie brings Merle back into that messy, complicated lineage, not just as a movie star, but as a queer icon of erasure and endurance. Sen writes with the ache of someone who knows that history doesn’t just forget people like us; it asks us to forget ourselves. But he also writes with the love of someone who refuses to comply.

There’s a moment in the book where Sen describes Merle weeping on Christmas, lonely in Hollywood, rejected by the very world she contorted herself to belong to. And I thought of the Christmas I spent sitting alone on the parapet at Marine Drive, watching the Queen’s Necklace glimmer like a cheap tiara, wondering if I would ever be allowed to be whole. Yes, I love Marine Drive. That's how it is.

This book doesn’t heal that wound but it names it. And sometimes that’s enough.

Merle Oberon didn’t get the legacy she deserved. Love, Queenie changes that. It gives her back her truth: fractured, flawed, and fiercely fought for. Just like ours.

[Priya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love, Queenie is a stunningly comprehensive biography of Merle Oberon, who we now know as the first South Asian actress in Hollywood.

As a South Asian person entwined in the world of entertainment and journalism, I was surprised by how little I knew of Merle’s life and the era in which she marked her incredible rise.

Enter Mayukh Sen, a thorough and highly intelligent writer who transports you into Merle’s lift adeptly. Sen writes with conviction, backed by what is clearly such comprehensive research. What he accomplishes in his writing is transporting us back to a golden era of Hollywood, while also bringing the reader into Merle’s head and heart — at times I felt like Merle leapt off the page, as if telling me her own thoughts, joys, and insecurities in her own words.

Love, Queenie is stunning in its embrace of Merle’s complexities, both humanizing her and contextualizing her journey in the larger picture of what was happening across the world, from immigration policy to racism, as she struggled to find herself and make it in an unforgiving industry.

This book wowed me time and time again, and I now have immense respect for Merle as a woman and a performer, as well as Sen as a writer.
Pick up this book — you won’t regret it!

[John Yingling · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written, fascinating look at an actress I never really paid much attention to, even though I had seen several of her movies. It's so sad that she had to hide her Indian roots so that she could get work in Hollywood. But it's unfortunately the way things were for any people of color back then. Nevertheless, she persisted in looking for work and fought to get the roles she acquired, but as a "white" woman only. I can't blame her for what she had to do. It's a sad indictment of life then in the United States, and while it is not as blatant as it was then, some aspects of this continue to this day.

[Madi Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most interesting biographies I’ve read. Merle Oberon had one of most glamorous and tragic Hollywood careers. A complex woman who was neither good or bad. She yearned for her South Asian roots but denied them at every turn. She was a diva and treated terribly by the studios. She was a true Hollywood legend

[Karyn M · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 / Love, Queenie the story of Merle Oberon, a woman who knew what she wanted and sacrificed what she had to, to get it. Difficult circumstances bought her into the world, her background and the times were stacked against her also. Yet she made it with the help of the right connections and such a drive to be rich and famous.

It was interesting and horrifying to hear the facts about U.S. policy on South Asian people. Also, the Film Industry and the factory it was (probably still is), including the complicity in creating stars' identities and the erasure of their real selves.

It feels well researched, and it says it’s a beautiful reclamation of her story, and it’s just that, so I did come away with the sense that the author had trouble delving into both sides of her story. That said, it may not be well rounded enough for you and you should probably read more about her, personally I don’t think I will.

I struggle to relate to someone who brushes their hair for 45 minutes every single day, leaves thousands of dollars' worth of fur coats behind, and doesn’t even know they are missing, who starts a new romantic relationship in the presence of her existing one (more than once). But I was not living her life, and she had a dream from a very early age and made it a reality, sadly the old adage that money does not bring happiness rings very true here.

3 ⭐️ Audiobook read by Sharmila Devar

[Kinnera · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars rounded up to 3.

Fascinating story of a woman I had never heard of before. Great topic, but the author couldn’t help themselves from coloring the biography with their own strong opinions, which didn’t leave much room for the reader to have their own opinions.

Not related to my rating, but the audiobook narrator’s choice of accent usage when quoting Merle felt glib and tacky

[Laney · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is wonderfully written and thoroughly researched. It’s primary issues are those shared by many biographies: 1) thinking that their subject is the main character of the world not just their own story and 2) thinking their subject is perfect and can do no wrong.

For example, Merle is perfect for every role, and every role (incredibly attenuated at times) relates to her real life in a way that made it oh so emotional for her. Her failures at the box office are never a result of Merle’s performance and are always a reflection of how others failed her. What failures and faults in her performance are undeniable (her refusal to do an American accent in roles) are written off as excusable or understandable or beyond her control. Decisions to not cast Merle are exclusively a slight to Merle and not a credit to her counterparts.

It’s hard to fault the author for writing the most sympathetic portrayal of Merle that he could knowing what we know of her and the context in which she lived and kept her secret, but it is worth noting and did feel like it took a bit away from the tragedy of her situation that she was striving for greatness that she seemingly didn’t have the talent to achieve.

[Bargain Sleuth Book Reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

For this and other book reviews, subscribe to my blog! www.bargain-sleuth.com

Thanks to NetGalley and W.W. Norton & Company for the digital copy of this book; I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I was about 19 when I first saw the Merle Oberon/Laurence Olivier movie version of Wuthering Heights, and I was charmed by both stars. Then, I saw the 1935 movie version of The Scarlet Pimpernel with Oberon and Leslie Howard. I greatly admired her acting, and throughout the years, heard some stories of the behind-the-scenes activity. Somehow, despite disparaging remarks made in publications when Oberon was at the height of her fame, the fact that she was South Asian was forgotten for decades.

I enjoyed reading about Merle’s life and her time in Hollywood. Because I had only seen some of her black and white movies, I never really thought anything about her skin color, which was darker than her WASP counterparts. She tanned very easily and was disparaged by producers and directors and even makeup artists through the years. She lived a life in fear of people finding out that she wasn’t white.

Love, Queenie was a great old Hollywood read, revealing how Merle Oberon denied her heritage for decades because #HollywoodSoWhite. Now, people are embracing her South Asian heritage even though Oberon could never truly do that during her lifetime. She received an Oscar nomination for one of her roles, making her, like Hattie McDaniel, a first. When Michelle Yeoh was all the talk last Oscar season, a reporter thought she was the first South Asian actress to be nominated for Best Actress, and Yeoh politely corrected the interviewer, mentioning Oberon as the first.

There are some absolutely horrific details about how Oberon’s “mother” made it impossible for Merle to have children when she was old enough. And her whole family dynamic was shocking for the time. I’m not going to give any spoilers, but Oberon’s personal life was as full of drama as her on-screen personas.

If you love old Hollywood, you’d probably enjoy this book. Oberon’s career was not as fruitful as it could have been, so she’s largely been forgotten, but the importance of her role in Hollywood at a time when passing as white was a real thing. This was a very well researched and informative book!

[eden]

what a lovely biography. i couldn’t think of a better book to honor merle’s legacy. she is one of the most resilient, compassionate people i have ever had the pleasure of reading about. although merle had her flaws, she was elegantly human. it made me happy knowing merle got to achieve her dream, even though the system was inherently against her— she kept persisting. she kept trying. merle never gave up. she was a trailblazer for south asian performers even if it wasn’t acknowledge in her lifetime. the world of film wouldn’t be the same without merle oberon, she is, and forever will be, a piece of history. queenie deserves her flowers and then some.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mayukh Sen has written a deeply sympathetic portrait of one of Hollywood’s most misunderstood figures. Love, Queenie is not only a love letter to Merle Oberon’s under appreciated filmography, but also an unflinching examination of how the era’s racial codes constricted her life, on and off the screen.

[Brown Girl Bookshelf]

When I first heard Mayukh Sen talk about “Love, Queenie,” he was sitting two chairs away from me as I interviewed him at BGB’s inaugural event. We were discussing his debut, “Tastemakers,” in which he unearths the stories of seven immigrant women who shaped America’s most beloved and commercially successful cuisines—only to be willfully erased from the nation’s culinary history. Sen comically lauded that his next book drew from his obsession with soap operas. But that teaser far underplays the mastery that is “Love, Queenie.”

What excites me most is how readers will witness the curiosity and care that define Sen’s approach to writing about Merle Oberon—a woman whose life was speckled with stardust, but left unnoticed by history. During Hollywood’s Golden Age—a time marked by rigid racial barriers—and an era when the United States enforced exclusionary immigration policies against South Asians, Merle Oberon rose to the heights of cinematic fame. Yet, her success was built on a carefully guarded secret, one that, if exposed, could have ended her career: though she could pass as white, she was not. Audiences believed she was born to an affluent white family in Tasmania, yet in reality, she was the daughter of a Sri Lankan mother and a white father, spending her early, impoverished years in Calcutta and Bombay.

Her story is one of ambition and heartbreak—of love lost and found, of men, of cinema, of a fractured identity she both concealed and carried.

I can’t decide what leaves me more in awe: Merle, the subject, or Mayukh, the writer—two figures whose paths seem fated to intersect. Sen writes with a rare, reverent devotion, coating every sentence in love and admiration for his subject—much like he did with “Tastemakers.” When Sen chooses someone as his biographical subject, it’s both a compliment and a compelling reason to pick up the book—after all, he has great taste in icons.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a well-written biography of a star whose face I recognized, but I didn’t know her name. It was both fascinating and sad to learn the details of her life and death. I would have loved to see more pictures; biographies lose points with me when they don’t include plenty of photographs. Additionally, I felt that the author injected a lot of personal opinions into the narrative that were not based on facts.

[Jeffd134 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written but repetitive. Great story though.

[Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars - A scholarly, almost overly so, look at Merle Oberon’s life and career.

I can’t deny the author did his due diligence and homework, and it’s clear how much of a fan he is of Merle Oberon. It was refreshing to read a fact and I could easily reference the exact source. The back of the book was beautifully organized by chapter and page number. I was able to find out exactly where he retrieved the story about Jean Harlow being the only movie star who was kind to Merle when she first came to Hollywood. A fact I don’t think I’ve ever read, or if I had, I didn’t remember it. I applaud the author’s hard work in documenting his sources and making it easy to reference back, because it’s shockingly rare in biographies, both past and present. Organization was stellar. I also loved the footnotes being stars, and not asterisk. Stylish, and functional! The cover was also beautiful, with a photo that I think shows Merle with a true smile. The chapters being broken down by the years was also smart, but I was disappointed in the print quality of the photos. Are books no longer publishing glossy photos in biographies?

Now, the way this book is written is almost like a textbook. I can’t say I enjoyed that too much. I wouldn’t say it was dry, but it felt like the author used a thesaurus to pick the longest words to sprinkle on the page. It made the book a little inaccessible for me, because I quickly gave up looking up what words I’d never seen actually meant and instead relied on context clues. 🤷‍♀️ This was a huge difference between the last old Hollywood book I read, “Daughter of Daring” that read almost too breezy and casual. There’s no in between here. We have a highbrow biography of Merle, who became successful in her own right, but who grew up poor in the slums of India—I don’t believe she ever finished elementary school—but she was still never college educated. That’s not a character fault, but I expected her story to read a little more relatable somehow. I don’t know, it seemed off to me. It read at times pretentious.

I always thought Merle and Vivien Leigh looked a lot alike, so I was surprised to see the comparison in print. Both women had Indian roots, Vivien was born in British India. Their career trajectories are much different. I don’t think Merle ever had a movie role that was as defining as Vivien’s as Scarlett O’Hara, though. Maybe “Wuthering Heights”? I’m not sure.

I walked away not really knowing too much about the woman behind the screen persona. And maybe that’s the point? She spent her entire life concealing her Indian heritage, to the point of obsession—threatening a lawsuit to her nephew (by marriage) if he even mentioned in a book she was born in India. We still don’t know too much about her now, her likes, her dislikes. We find out she loved the finer things in life, flaunted her jewelry quite like Elizabeth Taylor did. She wanted children and eventually adopted two, after finding out the woman she thought was her mother (she was actually her grandmother) had her sterilized as a young girl. She was very insecure about her looks when she was young, which unfortunately only got worse as she aged, and bowed to the pressures of the public with plastic surgeries. I don’t want to say Merle was shallow, but her temper tantrums on set stand out to me in an otherwise kind of bland perspective on her personality. She was pro-American, participated in a lot of WWII efforts, like many of her fellow Hollywood actors. She was an active supporter for Richard Nixon’s presidency, too,p. She was also very much against the women’s liberation movement, and I’m not sure why. It’s interesting the things she decided to speak out about. She didn’t with Marlon Brando’s Oscar protest, despite the fact that the Academy treated her, and others like her, as in different ethnicities and minorities, so poorly. (And continue to do so.)

We never find out if she knew about her conception, or that her mother was really her grandmother. She took care of her “sister” aka mother throughout her life, and also financially helped her half brothers and sisters. Yet she had no interest in meeting any of them in real life, I don’t believe she ever saw her mother after childhood. We get the impression she was so paranoid about her Indian secret being exposed, she’d do anything to keep it quiet, then she’d randomly blurt out her true origins to a driver, a hotel employee, etc. Bizarre! She’d also wear Indian fashions, much more in later life, which you’d think she’d stay far away from if she wanted to keep her true origins a secret.

I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the biography, I think overall it was beautifully well done. But, it didn’t make me want to actively track down any of Merle’s filmography. If anything, I’d watch a few of her comedies, but even then, I wouldn’t seek them out.

[steph · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

I had only heard of Merle Oberon briefly before a friend recommended this book. She was a Hollywood actress at a time when Hollywood was made up of white and rich people and she built a career on the lie that she was a white girl from Tasmania when in truth, she was born and raised in modern-day Mumbai, the daughter of a half Sinhalese and half British girl. The amount of research and care that went into this novel was staggering, you can tell the author respected Merle and tried to show her life in all its triumphs, tragedies and ordinary moments all the while intersecting it with her extensive filmology list. It was super interesting how Merle held onto the lie about her heritage, even up to her death but it also made complete sense because her whole life, her whole career actually, was built on a lie for decades and that is not easily dismantled in a day.

Very thought provoking and interesting book. I read snippets of it each day rather than binge it and I think that helped me in my enjoyment.

[Latika Nirula · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had first been exposed to Queenie (Merle Oberon) in a television mini-series in the late eighties. I was intrigued by her and at the same time cringed at the adaptation of the Korda novel that used brown face and romanticized “passing”. It was nice to read a more comprehensive and complex account of the life of the South Asian starlet who craved acceptance and shaped by a traumatic life. The biographer made some odd choices on what to focus on and didn’t cover some seminal moments of her life with a lot of depth (e.g., disfiguring car accident and the circumstances of it). Her romantic escapades and chasing eternal youth and beauty seemed to really shape her trajectory through her career and life, even though the author really tries to convince us that her “secret” about her ethnicity and true origin was a more deeper through line for her life. I am unconvinced. In time, I don’t think she was as much haunted by her past but more about how she would be perceived as a liar by the industry she constantly sought recognition of. To me, she still seems shallow and represents the stereotype of the fallen starlet.

[Loralei Standish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Merle Oberon had to deal with so much racism and sexism and absolutely wild opinions of her during her life, she must have had a lot of tenacity. Without the choices she made, she likely would never have had the opportunity for a film career at all, let alone a career as a leading lady. I just wish she’d been able to see a world where she was able to embrace her own identity and still find success.

[Alenka of Bohemia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have only ever seen one movie with Merle Oberon in it: The Wuthering Heights. I thought her stunning and a very talented performer. But behind the movie stardom she managed to achieve, there was a woman who was, above all, determined to succeed and was willing to do a great deal of things. She used her beauty and sexual allure a lot, burned a lot of bridges, but what truly defined her fight and subsequently her entire existence was the need to lie about her origins. In a time when Hollywood would never make a South-Asian (Anglo-Indian to be precise) actress a lead, she had to pretend to have been born in Australia, to not only leave her family behind but pretty much quietly renounce them (though she kept sending money). It undoubtedly caused her great pain, but she was strove for her goal and (perhaps not to the extent she had hoped) achieved it. This biography sensibly and convincingly weaves this essential topic throughout Merle´s life.

[Athena A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

a beefy tomato of a biography! dazzling prose, excellent critical research that seeks to go deeper than previous bio(s) of Queenie ever did… very intimate understanding of both the sociopolitical and personal— Mayukh is such a talented writer and the only man i would trust to write on a woman’s life

[4 stars is almost perfect for a biography tbh, especially since i did not know much about her prior, kudos to this book for setting the record straight on this Asian woman star in American film!]

[Lisa Doyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you Good Reads - I recently won this in a giveaway. Merle Oberon was one of Hollywood's first South Asian Stars. Book covers racial codes during her time both on and off the screen. Overall very interesting.

[Marika · Rating 3 out of 5]

*I read an advance copy and was not compensated

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

A needed if flawed biography. It's clear that the author loves its subject and has gone to great lengths to write a decently crafted book. Sadly, it leaves little voice for its subject with just comments she made to others and making her seem an angel at all times. Everyone hurts Merle in this version of the story with little of her own ownership of herself which takes another power away from her life filled with that.

[amanda luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review to come. Very very good. Definitely gonna check out Merle Oberon’s filmography now.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Making history in 1936 as the first Asian American to be nominated for Best Actress, Merle Oberon has a fascinating life story. Oberon played Cathy Earnshaw in the movie Wuthering Heights.

[Mary Katherine Kerr · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up an advance copy of this book from a little free library not knowing anything about it.

This ended up being so delightful! I really enjoyed learning about Merle Oberon’s life. The writing was empathetic and told a brilliant story. I feel motivated to watch some of the old films starring Merle Oberon now.

Worth the read! :)

[Sugarpuss O'Shea · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a Classic Movie junkie, I have undoubtedly heard of Merle Oberon, but she was never someone whose films I sought out. Quite frankly, my knowledge of her was based on Robert Ryan's biography (The Lives of Robert Ryan) and her seduction of him, so she was not exactly someone I harbored any feelings of fandom towards. With this book, that has now changed. How on Earth can you put yourself in front of a camera while hiding who you are? (Perhaps this is why movie-goers had difficulty connecting to her on-screen??) Anyone else would've crashed and burned. But not Merle. That's not to say it was all rainbows and unicorns. Hardly. But somehow, she survived 40 years in the viper pit that was the Hollywood Studio System. And now, thanks to Mr Sen, I have a new appreciation for Merle Oberon as not only an actress but also as a flawed, complex human being.

[Becca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite occasionally overwritten prose, Sen’s biography is beautifully empathetic and therefore immensely readable. By placing Oberon firmly in the context of her time, Sen extends grace to a complicated personality without shying away from her hardest edges. Love, Queenie is a love letter to its muse and to everyone who cannot live their truth openly.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book shows what racism South Asian women faced even in the movie industry. She rose to stardom facing this trauma. Very good book.

[Desirae · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the very opening pages, Love, Queenie draws the reader into the difficult, secret-laden origins of Merle Oberon. Sen recounts how she was born in 1911 in what is now Mumbai (then Bombay), to a white British father and a mother of South Asian descent. What complicates matters even more: the woman Oberon came to believe was her mother was actually her grandmother; her “sister” was likely her biological mother.

Raised in poverty, and subjected early on to racism and stigma linked to being mixed-race in colonial India, young Queenie grew up with confusion about identity, ancestry, and belonging.

Sen paints this early period not as a sentimental tragedy but as the foundation for Oberon’s drive: a woman haunted by roots she could never publicly acknowledge — yet determined to remake herself in a world that demanded whiteness.

Reinvention: The Rise of “Merle Oberon”
Using extensive archival work and family interviews, Sen shows how “Queenie” leveraged her looks, charm, and sheer will to escape her impoverished conditions and racial othering.

In her late teens she moved to London (bringing her grandmother with her) and began to edge into entertainment under various names — until film mogul Alexander Korda took her under his wing, gave her the stage-name “Merle Oberon,” and helped craft a completely new origin story: that she was born in Tasmania to white European parents.

The transformation was more than nominal. To survive in an industry built on whiteness, Merle had to suppress any hint of accent, conceal her heritage, and whitewash her history. As Sen writes, this wasn’t simply a pragmatic choice — it was a survival imperative in a Hollywood shaped by racist taboos and immigration laws hostile to South Asians.

Sen’s portrait isn’t one of gleeful opportunism, but of someone navigating a world where being “other” meant erasure or erasure of self — and Merle chose erasure as the price of passage.

Stardom and “Passing” — The High Cost of Fame
In her twenties and thirties, Merle Oberon became one of the most luminous stars in British and Hollywood cinema. Among her most iconic roles, as Sen recounts, are her portrayal of Cathy Earnshaw in the 1939 adaptation of Wuthering Heights opposite Laurence Olivier, and later her performance as Empress Josephine Bonaparte in the 1954 film Désirée. (I was named after the titular character of this film, albeit spelled differently).

In Wuthering Heights, set in the windswept moors of England, the part of Cathy is suffused with passion, longing, and conflicted identity — a perfect mirror of Oberon’s own inner life. Sen argues that the tension Cathy feels toward love and belonging, toward desire and doom, becomes almost autobiographical. The same woman hiding her past becomes the woman on screen torn between love and fate.

Decades later, in Désirée, Oberon embodied Empress Josephine — a woman marked by ambition, beauty, and the tragic weight of legacy and expectations. Merle’s performance drew on her own concealed vulnerabilities; Josephine’s manicured elegance, her silent longing, and the pressures placed on her as a woman mirror the pressures Oberon herself must have felt as a biracial actress in an unforgiving industry.

Through these roles, Sen doesn’t just chronicle a career — he excavates identity. He makes visible how Oberon’s art was both a hiding place and a revelation: a space where she could, fleetingly, be anyone she chose, yet never entirely be herself.


The Private Life: Secrets, Trauma, and the Price of “Passing”
What makes Love, Queenie compelling is that Sen does not glamorize Oberon’s life as a fairytale of rags to riches. Instead, he shows the heavy cost of her “success.” Growing up steeped in secrecy — not knowing who her real mother was, believing her grandmother to be her parent — shaped a life of constant concealment.

As soon as she had upward mobility, the pressure to maintain the fiction grew. The biography notes that her grandmother, the woman who raised her, was presented publicly as a maid when they moved to London — to support the illusion of whiteness.

Sen also recounts a dark detail: the grandmother had arranged for Oberon’s sterilization at age 17.

Whether this was enforced out of shame, fear, or survival is deeply distressing — a reminder of how, in her world, her body and her identity had been controlled long before she gained fame.

As Oberon matured, the burden of maintenance only grew heavier: toxic skin-lightening treatments, dangerous cosmetic practices, and later, after a 1937 car accident that damaged her face, Hollywood’s special lighting tricks to keep her “presentable.”

Even as she walked in glamour under spotlights, the foundation of that glamour was a lifetime of erasure, denial, and hidden pain — and Sen does not shy away from that truth.

Legacy, Mystery – and Why She Still Haunts Us
In retelling Oberon’s story — with its brilliance and its wounds — Mayukh Sen does not offer easy judgment. Instead, he invites empathy, understanding, and a reckoning. As one reviewer of the book puts it, this biography is “resurrection, … reckoning, … high camp mixed with high compassion.”

That tension — between glamour and trauma, identity and erasure — is what keeps Oberon’s legacy alive, even now. As Sen shows, in a world that refused people like her a place on screen, Oberon carved a space for herself. But she paid dearly.

Decades after her death in 1979, when her true origins were confirmed, we view her through a different light: not just as a glamorous screen goddess, but as a complicated human being who loved luxury, power, and attention — yet who also knew shame, fear, and self-denial.

In reading Love, Queenie, one emerges with the sense that Merle Oberon remains a mystery — not because her life was fictionalized (her biography reconstructs it in detail), but because she spent it hiding from herself. Her legacy is not simple: she was a pioneer, a victim, a star, and above all, a woman forced to choose between authenticity and survival.

In the end, perhaps we don’t — and can’t — fully know who Merle Oberon really was. But we can remember: her courage, her vulnerability, her contradictions. In that remembrance lies her truth.