One of Bookpage's 7 books to read this Women’s History Month
A beautiful reclamation of a pioneering South Asian actress captures her glittering, complicated life and lasting impact on Hollywood.
Merle Oberon made history when she was announced as a nominee for the Best Actress Oscar in 1936. Hers was a face that “launched a thousand ships,” a so-called exotic beauty who the camera loved and fans adored. Her nomination for The Dark Angel marked the first time the Academy recognized a performer of color. Almost ninety years before actress Michelle Yeoh would triumph in the same category, Oberon, born to a South Asian mother and white father in India, broke through a racial barrier—but no one knew it. Oberon was “passing” for white.
In the first biography of Oberon (1911–1979) in more than forty years, Mayukh Sen draws on family interviews and heretofore untapped archival material to capture the exceptional life of an oft-forgotten talent.
Born into poverty, Queenie Thompson dreamt of big-screen stardom. By sheer force of will, she immigrated to London in her teens and met film mogul Alexander Korda, who christened her “Merle Oberon” and invented the story that she was born to European parents in Tasmania. Her new identity was her ticket into Hollywood. When she was only in her twenties, Oberon dazzled as Cathy in Wuthering Heights opposite Laurence Olivier. Against the backdrop of Hollywood’s racially exclusionary Golden Age and the United States’s hostile immigration policy towards South Asians in the twentieth century, Oberon rose to the highest echelons of the film-world elite, all while keeping a secret that could have destroyed her career.
Tracing Oberon’s story from her Indian roots to her final days surrounded by wealth and glamor, Sen questions the demands placed on stars in life and death. His compassionate, compelling chronicle illuminates troubling truths on race, gender, and power that still resonate today.
About the Author
Mayukh Sen is the James Beard Award-winning author of Taste Makers. He is a 2025 Fellow at New America, and has written on film for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the Criterion Collection. He teaches journalism at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Praise For…
'What does America want from its stars when they come from the margins?' Sen asks in this extraordinary account of the hardship and rampant racism Oberon, a movie star who spent her entire career hiding her South Asian roots, faced during Hollywood’s golden age. — New York Times Book Review
The chroniclers of classic-era Hollywood have never quite known what to do with Merle Oberon….So it takes chutzpah and sympathy to write a biography about Oberon, but Mayukh Sen has both. — Ty Burr - Wall Street Journal
In Love, Queenie, writer Mayukh Sen cheerfully reclaims her story, narrating it with sensitivity and verve….[T]he book is written as if living alongside Oberon during her lifetime, giving emotional heft to her sometimes difficult choices.
— Carolyn Kellogg - Los Angeles Times
With fluid pacing, Sen traces the 'culture of exclusion' of the times that hobbled and channeled Oberon’s life and career….Sen’s story shines throughout. The narrative is woven with surgical precision, never flaunting the obvious depth of its research. — Akanksha Singh - Los Angeles Review of Books
Biographer Mayukh Sen…uses a compassionate lens….It could be tempting to dismiss Oberon as a self-absorbed, money-driven diva who acquired and shed lovers and husbands like outgrown fashions. But Sen elegantly and thoroughly performs a work of historical recovery for a subject whose uniqueness has never been fully understood or appreciated. — Kendra Nordin Beato - Christian Science Monitor
Merle Oberon, one of Hollywood’s first South Asian movie stars, gets her due in this engrossing biography, which masterfully explores Oberon’s painful upbringing, complicated racial identity, and much more. — Sophia M. Stewart - The Millions
Throughout every up and down of Oberon’s career, Sen pays her—and his readers—the implicit compliment of not turning his subject into a saint….Love, Queenie is earnestly affectionate but pulls none of these punches, which makes it both bracing and refreshing reading, the year’s first genuinely worthwhile movie star biography. All previous studies of this troubled, fascinating figure can be readily retired.
— Steve Donoghue - Open Letters Review
Her story was alluring enough to become the subject of biographies, novel and television mini-series. Yet nothing fully captured her drive, spirit and audacity. But now a farm-fresh biography, Love, Queenie by Mayukh Sen, locates, contextualises and explains Merle Oberon like none before...Sen guides us through every bend of her life, seeing her with a sympathetic lens.
— Avijit Ghosh - Times of India
[A] scrupulous and moving biography….Oberon’s elan embosses Sen’s easy and engaging prose….Thanks to Sen’s insightful, compassionate, and historically-attuned narrative skill, the significance of Oberon’s signature is legible beyond the page. — Sumaiya Aftab Ahmed - Metropolitan Review
Oberon's story is far richer than any of her screen roles….The book is a fascinating portrait of a woman of ambition as well as a look at Hollywood's color barriers. — Daniel Bubbeo - Newsday
Mr. Sen carefully corrects Charles Higham’s fanciful biography and filmographies that mistakenly attribute certain roles to Oberon….One of the most excruciating scenes in this powerful biography is Oberon’s late in life visit to Tasmania, still unable to admit the fiction of her birth there. — Carl Rollyson - New York Sun
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. — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Film critic Sen delivers a moving biography of Merle Oberon….[H]e emphasizes the stirring determination she showed in scrapping her way to the film industry’s upper echelon. It’s a poignant account of the sacrifices that enabled an extraordinary career. — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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. — Booklist (starred review)
A deeply drawn portrait of the fascinating screen star Merle Oberon. Told with empathy and rigor, it’s also a grand tour of Hollywood’s opulence and racism through the decades. A compelling story of one woman’s struggle to make a life for herself against the odds. I could not put this book down. — Padma Lakshmi, author of Love, Loss, and What We Ate
This entrancing book left me reflecting on the society that compelled such a star to hide who she was all her life. An invaluable biography rich with surprises, heartbreak, and the complicated fulfillment of dreams. — Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
Through Mayukh Sen’s remarkable book, I discovered a brilliant, ambitious actress who could achieve visibility only by making her past invisible. After reading Love, Queenie, I hold two opposing thoughts in my mind: ‘Look how far we’ve come,’ and ‘Not much has changed.’
— Poorna Jagannathan, actress, Never Have I Ever
A deeply sympathetic portrait of one of Hollywood’s most misunderstood figures. Love, Queenie is not only a love letter to Merle Oberon’s underappreciated filmography, but also an unflinching examination of how the era’s racial codes constricted her life—on and off the screen.
— Katie Gee Salisbury, author of Not Your China Doll
Merle Oberon never got to tell the true story of her life. Mayukh Sen finally has, and it rivals that of any character she played on the screen. I couldn’t put this book down. — Carla Valderrama, author of This Was Hollywood
The saga of Merle Oberon is one of Hollywood’s most extraordinary tales—one that has, at long last, found the right teller in Mayukh Sen, whose wonderful book is written with compassion, clear eyes, and panache. — Michael Schulman, author of Oscar Wars
