LOVE, QUEENIE

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.