‘Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star’
By Mayukh Sen
W.W. Norton, 314 Pages

Queenie Thompson grew up poor at Bombay, now Mumbai, with a South Asian mother who had been raped by a white man and raised by her grandmother, who pretended to be her mother while Queenie’s mother pretended to be her half-sister. These basic facts were never disclosed to Queenie, as she embarked on her quest to become a movie star with a new name, Merle Oberon.

Born Sándor László Kellner, Alexander Korda barged his way into British filmdom, becoming a producer, and he understood why a beautiful young woman would not want to be typed as an exotic. He concocted her new name and biography, including her birth in Tasmania and upbringing in England. 

Oberon bedded down with any male who could further her career. To avoid pregnancy, her grandmother/mother had Queenie sterilized at 17, though Queenie did not understand what was done to her until many years later when she tried to bear children.

Oberon’s biographer, Mayukh Sen, born in this country but of Bengali descent, identifies with Oberon, and argues against blaming her for a life of practiced deceit, for denying her ethnic origins in a Hollywood that offered precious few roles for Asian actors other than the stereotyped ones played by Anna May Wong.

Oberon lived in a counterfeit world in which, for example, writer Rebecca West did not acknowledge for many years her illegitimate son, Anthony, the child of her affair with H.G. Wells. Film mogul Samuel Goldwyn, an illegal immigrant who had changed his name, and who knew the truth about Oberon’s origins, protected her from exposure.

Oberon’s great friend, Norma Shearer, felt she could not reveal that she had a mentally disturbed sister without risking the public’s rejection of her as also a mental case. Like Oberon, who married Korda, Shearer had a husband/producer, Irving Thalberg, who protected her and helped her get plum roles. Thalberg, in turn, was part of an industry that, like Korda, sought to obscure the Jewish origins of many producers.

Mr. Sen rightly calls Oberon’s performance as Cathy in “Wuthering Heights,” co-starring with the surly Sir Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, her crowning achievement, though he notes other excellent performances that critics ignored while concentrating on her beauty, and then later on the deterioration of a face that went through many plastic surgeries.

Mr. Sen passes by Oberon’s performances in such weepies as “Night Song” with Dana Andrews. While researching my biography of him, I interviewed one of his daughters, who mentioned a trip with Oberon sunbathing on her father’s sailboat. Kathy Andrews, then a little girl, inadvertently stepped on Oberon’s face, not knowing, of course, how much damage had already been done to that famous visage by painful bleaching operations after sunbathing that dramatically darkened an already olive complexion.

Mr. Sen carefully corrects Charles Higham’s fanciful biography and filmographies that mistakenly attribute certain roles to Oberon. Mr. Sen is not, however, so careful with his own language, which too often resorts to cliches to be found in the Higham kind of Hollywood biographies. So it is that Korda and Oberon “traipsed over to the town of Antibes in the South of France and wed,” and, “His hands tied,” Korda was forced to accede to Oberon’s performance of a negligible role in “Wedding Rehearsal.”

Oberon was married four times — twice to wife beaters — but Mr. Sen does not try to explain why she took such abuse. She was still in love with one brute who died in an air crash, and seems to have loved all her husbands, who provided her with luxuries and career support that in the Hollywood of her day seemed essential to her.

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. The best she could do is tell another kind of lie: that she was conceived on a ship that was passing by Tasmania.

Oberon’s last husband, more than two decades younger, never knew her dark secret, so the cliche-pun seems inevitable. The irony, as Mr. Sen reports, is that the husband said that Oberon’s ethnicity would have made her all the more attractive to him. 

Mr. Rollyson is the author “Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero,” “Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews,” and “Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl.”