Love, Queenie

Starred review from January 1, 2025
The true story of a little-remembered star. "What does America want from its stars when they come from the margins?" This is the central question running through Sen's biography of Merle Oberon, a Hollywood star who audiences believed was "born to well-heeled white parents on the Australian island of Tasmania"--but was in fact the child of a Sri Lankan mother and white father who spent her impoverished early years in Calcutta and Bombay. The child of rape, Oberon--then called Queenie--grew up believing that her grandmother, Charlotte, was her birth mother and was never told that her real birth mother was Constance Joy Selby, who claimed to be her half-sister. While raising Merle, Charlotte secretly had the future star sterilized at age 17 and masqueraded as Merle's maid when the two moved to London to help her granddaughter maintain the fiction that she was white. After moving to Hollywood, Oberon's tribulations continued as she experienced domestic violence and underwent unsafe medical procedures to preserve her light skin. Despite these hardships, Oberon starred in an impressive slate of films--opposite luminaries like Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier--that showcased her beauty and undeniable acting skills. Sen's thorough research, graceful prose, and nuanced analyses of the systems of oppression framing Oberon's life offer a layered and engrossing portrait of a woman who skyrocketed to well-earned stardom while enduring the trauma of hiding her race. An extraordinary biography of an extraordinary South Asian woman.

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Starred review from February 1, 2025
A muddled identity was always at the core of Merle Oberon's persona, on and off screen. Born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, to a British father and Indian mother, Queenie, as she was nicknamed, grew up never knowing that the woman who raised her was her grandmother and that the girl she called sister was really her mother. Her place of birth and mixed-race heritage only added to the confusion when Oberon pursued an acting career. Graced with "exotic" features and erotic charm, Oberon's darker skin tone was a liability in an age when the stringent Hays Production code prohibited the casting of actors of South Asian heritage in anything other than minor and highly stereotypical roles. A new backstory had to be created for this woman whose beauty beguiled the camera, and so Tasmania was listed as her birthplace, a fiction that would haunt her throughout her life. A devout and dedicated fan, Sen anchors Oberon's complicated story and spotty filmography within the racism and classism of the early twentieth century, crediting her as a pioneer for the growing cadre of South Asian actors only now breaking through filmdom's capricious prejudices. Sen finally gives this oft-overlooked actor her due.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 7, 2025

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. VERDICT Sensitively drawn and without hindsight judgment, Sen's biography of Oberon depicts a determined woman who triumphed at a high personal cost.--Liz French

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