A new biography tells the story of a South Asian Hollywood star who passed as white
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. A good biography can tell a story bigger than the life of its subject. It can use a life story from the past to raise questions about the things we're dealing with today. Mayuk Sen's biography, Love Queenie, does just that. It's a biography of Merle Oberon, a South Asian actor working in the 1930s who passed as white and was able to reach the highest highs in Hollywood.

In this interview with Hieronazdipo Fernandez, Sen talks about Oberon's complicated family history and how she maneuvered her way through the male-dominated space of Hollywood. That's coming up.

Before we let the Oscars rest for the year, a question. Do you know who was the first Asian nominated for Best Actress? If you said Michelle Yeoh, well, that's wrong. Almost nine decades before Yeoh won her Oscar, Merle Oberon was up for the award for 1935's The Dark Angel. She starred in Wuthering Heights, an adaptation of Emily Bronte's beloved novel a few years later. He's good.

Make the world stop right here. Make everything stop and stand still and never move again. Make the Moors never change and you and I never change. But if you didn't know that Merle Oberon was of South Asian descent, that's because she had to hide the fact for her entire career. It's known as passing as white.

Mayuk Sen tells Merle Oberon's story in the new book Love, Queenie. And he joins us now from the NPR New York studios. Mayuk, welcome. Deepa, thank you so much for having me. It's an honor. Let's dive right in with that clip there that we just heard. It was Wuthering Heights that first introduced you to Merle Oberon.

Can you talk about what it was like to see her on the screen? Oh, absolutely. So I remember it with crystalline precision. I was completely mesmerized by her performance. And going into that film, I knew her backstory, or at least its broad contours. I knew that she was a mixed-race South Asian and white woman who had been born into poverty in India and grew up in Kolkata, which is the city where my dad, who was Bengali, was from.

And I was just enormously moved by the fact that someone who had such pain in her private life could set that aside and create work of such lasting power. I just want you to talk about that fact that she had to hide who she was, because as you mentioned, she was born into poverty. You also drop another bombshell. Not only is she hiding who she is, the woman she thought of as her mother who raised her was

was actually her grandmother. And she never knew that her real mother was the woman she believed to be her half-sister. I mean, the mind boggles. Why? Yeah, there's so much tragedy just in her early life. So she was the illegitimate daughter of a 14-year-old, a half-Sinhalese and half-white woman named Constance, and a white father, of course. But because she

She was part of what was known as the Anglo-Indian community, despite the fact that her ethnic roots were in what is today Sri Lanka. Because she was born and raised in India, she was subsumed within this broader racial category of Anglo-Indians because of her mixed South Asian and white heritage.

She was neither here nor there, essentially. She was unable to assimilate fully with fellow South Asians, nor was she quite accepted by white folks around her. But because Anglo-Indians like herself face so much prejudice in that period in Indian history...

Yeah.

You know, and I learned a lot from your book because, you know, in my extended family, I have people who identify as Anglo-Indian. I always just thought that that term was kind of their way of embracing their whiteness to put themselves kind of higher than the rest of us.

Anglo-Indian, as you point out in the book, really was not a good place to be, especially for someone like Merle Oberon. She had to get out of India to actually get ahead. Absolutely. She faced so much discrimination in class terms and also because of the way she spoke. She had a sort of accent that many people disparaged her for. And she really could not find a way to realize her dreams within India because she had been

from a young age wanted to be an actress. So the only way for her to achieve those dreams was to leave India and go to London, which she did when she was 18 years old in 1929. So she's in England. From there, she has her sights set on Hollywood.

And she gets there. But it seems, I have to say, Mayuk, to be that she has to do this by her relationship with various men who are key in advancing her career. Talk a little bit about that. Cheers.

She knew how to use her beauty and charm to get ahead, and I think that was just something that she had learned as a sort of survival mechanism. You know, the man who spotted her back in London was a man named Alexander Korda, who was this film mogul who would later become her first husband in 1939. But it was her being noticed by a man named Joseph Shank, actually, who was a big-time producer in Hollywood.

And throughout all of this, she's covering up her South Asian identity. She's passing, as we mentioned in the intro, as white. And she's also, as we mentioned in the intro, she's passing as a white woman.

Part of that goes along with elaborate stories. There's even one part where she's born in Tasmania, the little island off of Australia. I mean, there's so much to this that she herself goes along with.

Why? Would it really have been such a killer to her career if someone had known that her mother was part Sri Lankan? Absolutely. You know, she arrives in Hollywood in a time when the industry has begun stringently enforcing what's known as the Hays Code, which was a set of restrictive and kind of puritanical rules meant to

governed studio filmmaking after the industry had been rocked by a bunch of scandals back in the 1920s. And one of those stipulations barred the depiction of what was then called miscegenation or interracial romance, right? And this was a point in American history when miscegenation was outlawed in various parts of the country, including California. But in

In addition to that, America itself had outlawed immigration from India starting in 1917. Alongside that came a 1923 Supreme Court ruling that barred Indian immigrants from obtaining citizenship because of their race. And those policies were the results of long-simmering animus towards South Asian immigrants that had kind of roiled the American mind since the early 20th century. So there was great danger in her for even being on American soil. So she absolutely had to pass. She didn't have much of a choice.

But also, you know, she couldn't stay in the sun too long, lest she got too brown. She used products to whiten her face. You were just telling us about the prejudice. Then in the 1940s, her career starts to go downhill. Why? Yeah, so throughout the 1930s, after she comes to Hollywood, she primarily works under the ages of a man named Sam Goldwyn, who actually...

as the head of United Artists, essentially takes her under his wing and says, I'm going to make you into my next big star. And he does everything he can to make sure that no one gets word of her South Asian heritage. But it's actually after the release of 1939's Wuthering Heights that the two of them mutually decide to part ways. And, you know, she kind of bounced around from studio to studio.

In addition to that, I would say that starting in the 1940s, you start to see many more color films being produced, and that poses sort of danger to someone like Merle Oberon, whom, as you say,

You know, if she was in the sun for too long, she would have to undergo skin bleaching at the behest of her studios. So she really was... So she does better in black and white. Oh, absolutely. And that's something that her family actually stressed to me. It helped her pass. You did a lot of research for this book. And I'm guessing a lot of it was finding her family members and interviewing them to stitch together this story together.

Did they know all these details of her life or are they learning things as they read your book because they've told you one part of it? Yeah, they only knew one part of it. I really pounded the pavement to find some of her surviving family members from India. My

looked at funeral home listings to see surviving next of kin, plugged those names into every possible database until I found the right people and I want to respect their privacy. But I was able to talk to them for many hours and they shed so much light on what

it was like for Merle to grow up in India during a deeply prejudicial time. And in addition to that, what life was like for her mother, who told her family, in fact, that Merle was her half-sister. She took that secret with her to her grave as well, the fact that Merle was, in fact, her biological daughter. But I'm so grateful that, you know, I was able to correct all the misinformation that is out there about Merle Oberon. And what do you think, just ending for us, this story means today?

You know, I fear that we are approaching a time in American history that is sadly quite reminiscent of 1930s America, in which people will be forced to hide aspects of their identity. And this may very well have a chilling effect on the entertainment industry. We're already seeing some companies kind of roll back DEI efforts in an effort to kowtow to the current ruling administration. And I want my readers to read...

Mayuk Sen's book is Love Queenie, Merle Oberon, Hollywood's first South Asian star. Mayuk, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Deepa.