The Unsung Pioneer of the Oscars

The Atlantic

01-03-2025

In 1935, a young actor named Merle Oberon landed the role of a lifetime. The Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn was planning to remake the 1925 silent film The Dark Angel as a talkie. Oberon, with her coaly hair and olive complexion, did not quite fit into anyone's idea of the heroine, who in the silent film had been a fair-skinned maiden of the English countryside. Goldwyn's colleagues thought her too 'exotic' and 'Oriental' for the part; when the casting was announced, readers wrote into fan magazines taking umbrage with the selection of an 'Asiatic adventuress,' as one letter noted.
But Goldwyn was convinced of her promise. His instincts proved correct when reviews praised Oberon as a revelation. 'Miss Oberon, abandoning the Javanese slant of the eyes for the occasion, plays with skill and feeling,' The New York Times stated. Such critical rapture would bring her to the Eighth Academy Awards as a nominee for Best Actress alongside Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. At the time, however, the public was not aware of a crucial part of Oberon's life: She was Asian, technically making her the first performer of color to be nominated in any acting category at the Oscars. Oberon, who was born into poverty in Mumbai to a Sri Lankan mother and white father, had followed her publicists' demands to 'pass' as a white woman from Tasmania—a deception that would continue until her death, in 1979, and that was revealed only in the following decade.
I first learned about Oberon as an Oscar-obsessed high schooler in the late aughts. I was drawn to her story because of our shared South Asian heritage and our connection to Kolkata, the city where she—like my Bengali father—was raised. Her work as the tragic heroine Cathy Earnshaw in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights, arguably her most famous film, transfixed me. At the time, there were few South Asian faces in Hollywood, and the fact that Oberon had managed to break through more than 50 years earlier beggared belief in my young mind.
In writing a biography of Oberon, I came to see her as an early screen pioneer despite her elision from narratives of racial progress in Hollywood. Oberon's race did not overly restrict the roles she was offered; in fact, her entire career refused such tidy outcomes. Through her work, she was an early—if accidental—proponent of so-called color-blind casting, in which a performer's race does not limit the parts available to them, long before such a concern became standard in the industry. She deserves compassion, not judgment, for the constraints she was working under to make this possible.
Two years ago, Oberon's name briefly reentered the news cycle when Michelle Yeoh became the second Asian actor to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, 87 years after Oberon's recognition in that category. The complexities that Oberon's story presented had outlets scrambling —some relegated her to a 'technicality,' while others engaged in semantic contortions and called Yeoh the Academy's first 'Asian-identifying' Best Actress nominee. 'Some recordkeepers consider Merle Oberon (1936, The Dark Angel) to be the first Asian best actress nominee, but she hid her ancestry (her mother was reportedly of partial Sri Lankan descent) and passed for white,' wrote The Hollywood Reporter 's Rebecca Sun in an article whose headline declared Yeoh to be the 'First Asian Best Actress Nominee,' thus discounting Oberon.
But Oberon was no self-hating, assimilationist stooge of whiteness; instead, the social and political conditions of her era forced her to pass. Oberon's mixed-race, lower-class roots alienated her, as a young girl in India, from surrounding society. After immigrating to London in the late '20s by pretending to be the wife of an English jockey, she began her screen career as a contract player with London Films, a company whose studio publicists stipulated that she conceal her heritage and birthplace to increase her appeal. Compliance with this mandate would, in theory, grant Oberon access to the same parts as white performers. The role that made her a star was that of Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII —playing a woman who was, to be clear, white. But in Oberon's early days, most other roles she played were foreign women—French, Spanish, even Japanese—due to her 'exotic' looks, to borrow from that era's dated parlance.
Despite this, she made an impression on critics—and, in 1934, Hollywood beckoned. At the time, the United States had outlawed immigration from India and barred Indians from obtaining American citizenship, conditions that would not change until 1946's Luce-Celler Act. Raising the stakes were the injunctions of the Hays Code, whose puritanical rules demanded that studio filmmakers in Hollywood shy away from depictions of interracial romance. South Asian characters were almost always played by white actors in 'brownface,' a cosmetic embellishment that involved the use of dark makeup.
These circumstances thus demanded that Oberon continue keeping her heritage a secret—even if it meant enduring procedures as torturous as skin bleaching at the behest of studios. But in Oberon's mental calculus, such sacrifice would allow her to establish herself as a serious performer, as opposed to ornamental eye candy. Upon clinching the role in The Dark Angel, Oberon would express relief that she was at last allowed to abandon the artifice of her former screen persona, which—with the exception of Anne Boleyn—was usually premised on her perceived 'exotic' attributes. She effectively equated playing the parts of foreigners, heavy on makeup, to donning a costume—a child's conception of acting. 'I assumed a personality as unlike myself as possible,' she would tell a journalist about her past roles. Now, she reasoned, she could achieve something closer to artistic truth.
As she evaded persistent press rumors about her South Asian heritage, Oberon went on to climb Hollywood's ranks. She would star opposite Gary Cooper, romance Clark Gable, and butt heads with Marlene Dietrich, who called her 'that Singapore streetwalker,' a quip that conveys the disdain with which many in Hollywood's Golden Age regarded Oberon. Despite such coded references to her racial roots—which were 'not by any means a well-kept secret' in Hollywood, her former nephew by marriage Michael Korda wrote in his 1999 book, Another Life —Oberon came to excel in playing genteel, salt of the earth, and, crucially, white characters.
In this regard, Wuthering Heights was perhaps her most demonstrative showcase. As Cathy, she toggled among moods—stubbornness, determination, heartbreak—with fluency. Today, one might read irony into the fact that Oberon played a character whom Emily Brontë had conceived as canonically white, while Oberon's white co-star, Laurence Olivier, played Heathcliff, a man of indeterminate racial origin. (References to his potential South Asian heritage abound in Brontë's text and the 1939 film, which explains some of the resistance to director Emerald Fennell's announcement last year that she would adapt the novel with Jacob Elordi, who is white, as Heathcliff.) But the honesty Oberon brought to that character's torment proves that she was the right actor for the part, irrespective of color.
Oberon achieved her dreams in a society that asked her to deny who she was. Her struggle had its bittersweet upsides, making it easier for performers in subsequent generations to follow what she put into practice. In 1986—seven years after Oberon's death—the Actors' Equity Association established the Nontraditional Casting Project, an endeavor meant to widen roles for actors of color as well as those with disabilities. These efforts would eventually facilitate an ecosystem more hospitable to South Asian performers. Oberon's strides foretold the ability of Dev Patel, of Gujarati descent, to assume the title role in The Personal History of David Copperfield, based on the Charles Dickens novel. She laid the foundation for Riz Ahmed, of Pakistani origin, to play Ruben in Sound of Metal, whose racial heritage is of subordinate concern in the narrative.
Color-blind casting is not without its fierce critics. (Some prefer the term color-conscious, implying sensitivity and awareness rather than studied obliviousness.) The casting of the Black actor Halle Bailey and the half-Colombian Rachel Zegler as two beloved Disney princesses—Ariel and Snow White, respectively—in live-action remakes has made both women targets of conservative ire. More progressive critics may see such choices as a vestige of a distortedly optimistic era that encouraged Americans not to 'see' race, thereby papering over the racial inequities endemic to American society rather than acknowledging them with clear eyes.
Skeptics might also question making Oberon an early emblem of such efforts, because she possessed a privilege—being able to pass—that other performers of color did not. But the more uncomfortable truth is that Oberon was in the lifelong position of a fugitive, constantly forced to dodge hearsay about her heritage that could have ended her career. Rumors about her really being a 'Hindu'—a racial rather than religious classification in early-20th-century America—trailed her from her beginning days in Hollywood, when emigration from India was illegal, until the end of her life. By that point, she had gained the public's trust and established her reputation as one of Old Hollywood's grande dames, yet she kept her secret. She built her life, as one of her relatives told me, on thin ice.
Oberon's life, with its deep psychological costs, may seem to be a cautionary tale. What, I have often wondered, would Oberon's career have looked like had an actor of her talent worked in a less hostile time? The intolerances that once straitjacketed Hollywood have faded substantially since Oberon's era. The industry's performers of color can now fight for the same respect granted to their white peers, and do so more freely, on their own terms—without having to hide.