Why Merle Oberon kept her secret Asian identity

The star of the Golden Age Merle Oberon film comes to life in a new windy biography, partially sparked the news in 2023 that she was half Asian, a secret that she kept all her life.

When Michelle Yeoh was nominated for the main actress Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All of OfDy”, the media reported that she was the first Asian woman to receive the honor – then revised their stories, adding that Oberon was there first, with “The Dark Angel” from 1935. (Yeoh won;

The truth about Oberon, who died in 1979, was known since the 1980s, first in a poorly considered biography, then in a “sordidA novel by his nephew of the time, Michael Korda. In “Love, Queenie”, the writer Mayukh Sen happily recovers his story, telling it with sensitivity and verve.

“As a teenager, I had a huge empathy for the struggle of Merle Oberon,” writes Sen. “Most of the gay boys I knew tended to display the other divas of the time, but my chosen idol was Merle.” Sen has both understood Oberon's desire to hide a secret and recognized a trace of his South Asian accent. He hopes that this story will encourage people to revisit his filmography.

For the most part, the book is written as if she lived alongside Oberon during her lifetime, giving her an emotional weight to her sometimes difficult choices. But some of the complexities of its secret origins must be settled first.

Fans of cinema who met Oberon in the 1930s – “The Scarlet Pimpernel”, “The private life of Henri VIII” – heard that she was a British actress born in Tasmania, raised by her father as a British officer and his wife in India until adolescence, then brought to England.

The truth is that she was born Estelle Merle Thompson in 1911 in what is now Mumbai. His mother's side came from what is now Sri Lanka, and his father was an unidentified British soldier. They were very poor and being a mixed race in his community was difficult.

And even if she didn't know, Estelle was misleading about her parentage – her older sister was in fact her mother; The mother who raised them was her grandmother. Maybe there is something in this kind of family secret that feeds the actors – the same has happened to Jack Nicholson. It was Estelle's grandmother, Sen told us, who nicknamed her queen.

As soon as she could, Queenie has exploited her beauty to go out. She obtained a ticket for London with a pretender struck, bringing her grandmother. Arriving in England in 1929, Queenie groped on the edges of the entertainment activity, hoping to be an actor. She was not good, but she was beautiful and extraordinarily determined. Some friends of that time felt that she used them; When people met her darker mother (grandmother), Queenie told them that she was her maid.

Soon, director Alexander Korda took him under his wing and she adopted the name Merle Oberon. Merle tried to lose his Indian accent. The Korda team has prepared a new story of origin, choosing Tasmania as a place of birth because it was so distant and obscure. It was simple and common then to start a cinematographic career with a new identity; It is difficult to imagine that anyone who would have understood how significant this erasure built would be significant and unrealible for the life and heritage of Merle.

A brief commitment with the powerful executive of Hollywood, Joseph Schenck, led her to obtain a contract in the United States, she was able to divide her time between England and Hollywood; The unique arrangement said that the studios on both sides of the Atlantic believed that it was a superstar.

In 1939 Oberon was at a top. She played in “Wuthering Heights”, her best made film, with Laurence Olivier. She married Korda and dubbed her with jewelry. They bought a luxurious house in Los Angeles.

Sen shows us another part of history. Oberon was miserable acting with Olivier. He wanted his wife, Vivien Leigh, to obtain the role and took him to Oberon. She fell so sick that she had to be hospitalized.

Oberon was sitting pretty with Korda, but she was not as lovely as he was and continued at least a public affair. Korda returned to England to support the war effort, and Oberon did the same in the United States.

In Los Angeles, Oberon appreciated the outdoors and tanned, becoming much darker than his colleagues. His dark skin was a problem at work, sometimes leading to filming delays. Directors and producers led it to use bleached creams. Of course, some contained toxins, causing skin problems. On the one hand, it appeared in Max Factor make -up advertisements; On the other hand, her skin condition has become so serious that, years later, a director of photography would invent embellishing light, which is always used, which bears her name (reader, she married him).

In “Love, Queenie”, the writer Mayukh Sen happily recovers the story of Merle Oberon, telling it with sensitivity and verve.

(CJ Marteran)

The reason why this ambitious beauty deserves another look now, Sen reminds us is that all the time, her true identity has put her into danger. He explains the vast rules that had prevented the United States South Asians-without his false identity, Oberon might not even have obtained the entry. In addition to that, the Hollywood Haywood code has prohibited the metory – no interracial romance. Oberon's career was built on his possibility of having a romance with white head men. Does this wonder that she has kept her secret origins?

This first seemed to be an informed commercial decision to try to be a star in England and the United States did not quite stimulate this way. During the studio era, Oberon found himself without the solid base which would have given him roles and plum scripts. She fought the pressure from decreasing celebrity, but it was not easy to be a 40 -year -old beauty queen in Hollywood.

In the mid -1950s, Oberon married a rich Italian industrialist, Bruno Pagliai, based in Mexico. Oberon and Pagliai built a superb villa in Acapulco, and she moved to organize starred evenings covered by Vogue and Life Magazine. They adopted two children – orphaned Italian brothers and sisters. Many years earlier, in India, Oberon's grandmother had taken her to obtain an operation so that she does not get pregnant. This initial cruel precursor, or a subsequent attempt to reverse him, meant that Oberon could not have his own children.

By the 1960s Swing, Oberon tanned and pushed his long hair but kept his secret identity. Social rules and customs were changing, but she reacted by leaning back. It was a Republican who supported Governor Ronald Reagan. She produced and played in the 1973 film “Interval” which was widely criticized for her outdated approach to romance. However, Oberon was not completely out of date – she again divorced and married her co -star, Robert Wolders, who was 25 years old.

Oberon had too many novels, too many films, too many unhappy destiny twists to mention them all here. Today we ask why she never took the opportunity to reveal her real past. Sen asks us not to judge but to clearly look at the racism she had to face, the work she has done and the fullness of her impossible history.