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

Sen (food and culture writing, NYU Sch. of Journalism.; Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America) takes up the gauntlet for film actor Merle Oberon, born Estelle Merle Thompson but nicknamed “Queenie,” in colonial India in 1911. Her father was white, and her mother was South Asian, which marked her as “Anglo Indian” in her homeland—a social and racial barrier to her dreams of stardom. For the young and beautiful Queenie to succeed in show business (first in Britain, then in Hollywood), she had to leave India, lose her accent, conceal her heritage, and fabricate a backstory of being born to white parents in Tasmania. Sen writes sympathetically, often empathetically, of Oberon’s struggles to pass as white and keep her secrets, emphasizing the precarity of her position in Hollywood at a time when Asians were rarely seen onscreen and when the United States enforced stringent immigration quotas. The historical notes about immigration are somewhat awkwardly inserted between accounts of Oberon’s film career, romantic dalliances and marriages, and home life.