The Hollywood legend who spent her career passing as white

Sydney Morning Herald

15-05-2025

CINEMA
Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star
Mayhukh Sen
W.W. Norton & Company, $29.99
Who was the most beautiful actress ever in film? Merle Oberon of course. This is not an opinion, but a statement of fact. I learned this when I was comparatively young, and it has stayed with me for decades, including the one in which I managed to meet her at Ghalal, her Acapulco home, confirming in 3D the evidence I'd had from her long screen career.
However, there were other critical matters in her life, apart from her pristine beauty, most importantly the suppression of the details of her birth in India, the life-long strain of which Mayhuk Sen's biography bears out in a thoroughly researched and persuasively recorded exploration of a complex life.
For many years, it was widely believed that Merle was born in Tasmania, whereas the true biological history was very different. She was the daughter of a very young Indian mother, Constance Selby, and Arthur Thompson, her British rapist-father, who was almost totally absent from her life. She was seen as a 'charity case' at school in India, and her poverty-stricken Anglo-Indian background was subject to awful racism and class distinction, as would, of course, have been the case in the UK or the US when she first ventured there.
In re-inventing herself as being of Anglo-French origin and working on her skin colour, she opted for a Tasmanian birthplace, presumably because of its vast distance from where she wanted to make a career.
Sen offers a moving account of the poverty and pain in which she lived when she first moved to London. As Queenie Thompson, she longed for a movie career, and to London she was accompanied by her grandmother Charlotte, as her housekeeper – her actual mother now excluded from the scene – and after trying some possibilities Queenie had arrived at her professional name as we know it.
The early 1930s was not a very inspiring era of British filmmaking, but Merle garnered a few small roles in what were known as 'quota quickies', 'supporting' films, famous for their lack of distinction. A modest turning-point for her was the role of Anne Boleyn in Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII, memorably concerned that her hair will 'hold together when my head falls'. It is a small role, but Merle imbued it with a touch of courage and poignancy.
After her success opposite Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), she was invited to Hollywood by studio boss Joseph Schenk, and made her way to stardom in the romantic drama The Dark Angel. In the rest of the decade, despite American racist attitudes, she would come and go between the US and the UK, but undoubtedly, it was her role as Cathy in William Wyler's classic version of Wuthering Heights that made her a world star, even if co-star Laurence Olivier was displeased that she had outdone Vivien Leigh for the role.