Merle Oberon, a Hollywood Star With a Career-Ending Secret

The Academy Awards always bring with them a series of firsts. First Black man to win for best costume design (Paul Tazewell). First openly trans person to be nominated for an Oscar (Karla Sofía Gascón). First Latvian film to win an Oscar (“Flow”).

But one first that’s often overlooked is Merle Oberon’s. In 1936, Merle became the first Asian actress to be nominated for an Oscar for her role in “The Dark Angel.” There was, however, no barrage of splashy news headlines to follow.

This was because Merle wasn’t widely known to be a person of color: Years before, as she was beginning her career, she decided to pass as white, hiding her South Asian identity to make it in an industry that was resistant to anything else.

“The inspiring thing about Merle is that she succeeded in a system that was stacked against her at every turn,” said Padma Lakshmi, the host of the Hulu documentary series “Taste the Nation.” “That subterfuge that she engaged in regarding her identity was a necessary tactic that she needed to employ.”

In February, when Mindy Kaling received a Hollywood Walk of Fame star, many news publications reported that she was the first South Asian woman to be given the honor — but 65 years prior, Merle was awarded a star. In 2023, ahead of Michelle Yeoh becoming the Academy’s first Asian best actress winner, some articles incorrectly stated that she was also the first person of Asian descent to be nominated.

Now the subject of the new biography “Love, Queenie,” by Mayukh Sen, and on the heels of the 97th Academy Awards, Merle and her legacy are still relevant: Almost 90 years ago, she secretly paved a path in Hollywood that has remained largely invisible to the public. What can her story tell us about representation and the film industry today?

Dark Beginnings

Originally named Estelle Merle Thompson, Merle was born under dark circumstances in Bombay, India.

Her mother, Constance Selby, was only 14 when she gave birth to Merle in 1911. Constance had been raped by her stepfather, so Charlotte Selby, Constance’s mother, raised Merle as her own. Merle grew up believing that Charlotte (her grandmother) was her mother and that Constance (her mother) was her sister.

Life in India was less than pleasant. Charlotte and Merle moved to what was then known as Calcutta, modern-day Kolkata, and were living in poverty. Because her birth father was white, Merle was considered Anglo Indian, an identity that subjected her to daily prejudice in school. The year Merle was born, the census recorded around 100,000 Anglo Indians out of a population of over 315 million. “Theirs was a community that the ruling class preferred not to acknowledge: Anglo-Indians were breathing evidence of Britain’s imperial malfeasance,” Mr. Sen writes in his book.

But she found hope in at least one place: the movies. Growing up, she watched films at the theaters and developed aspirations of one day being in them herself. So, in 1929, when an opportunity to move to England and build a new life presented itself, Merle leaped. She pretended to be the wife of an English jockey she was romantically involved with in Calcutta; he paid for her to come to England, and Charlotte, who was darker-skinned, pretended to be Merle’s servant. This gut-wrenching ruse was the gateway to a new life.

In London, Merle came to know Alexander Korda, a studio executive who helped invent her back story: She was the daughter of two European parents, and her birthplace had been the just-exotic-enough island of Tasmania. As Merle acted in films, including “Men of Tomorrow” and “Wedding Rehearsal,” her profile rose, and the British press grew smitten with the rising star.

In 1934, with Hollywood ambitions, Merle arrived in the United States to star in “Folies Bergère de Paris,” her first American film. Though she wasn’t starting from scratch, she faced a new set of prejudices and challenges. Speculations about her race abounded — Mr. Sen notes in his book that a 1935 article in The Washington Post referred to Merle’s “parentage” as “one-half Indian (Hindu, not Dakota).”

The rumors had the potential to tear down her career and her existence in the country altogether.

“In the decades leading up to Oberon’s arrival in Hollywood, the United States had passed a series of increasingly strict anti-Asian immigration laws,” said Vivek Bald, a documentary filmmaker and the author of “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America.” The Immigration Act of 1917 created an “Asiatic Barred Zone,” banning the entry of people from most Asian countries.

Around the same time, immigrants from many European countries were coming to the United States in large numbers. “That period — the late 19th and early 20th century — is now celebrated as a kind of golden age of immigration,” Mr. Bald said. “But for Asians, it was an age of immigrant exclusion.”

Merle’s cover story was more than just a personal branding ploy. It was also her passport.

Hollywood was exclusionary in its own ways, too. It had begun enforcing the Hays Code, which restricted or banned the portrayal of interracial romance, nudity and other subjects viewed as obscene in movies. This climate made it difficult, often impossible, for many performers of color to be cast, and Merle had to “move very cautiously in those early days,” Mr. Sen said.

Merle was just one of several actresses — Carol Channing, Raquel Welch, among others — for whom success also meant not being able to publicly embrace their heritage or hiding it altogether.

A ‘Quiet Milestone’

Soon after moving to America, Merle came to know Samuel Goldwyn, a film producer who had plans to remake “The Dark Angel,” a silent film from 1925. He would, also, remake Merle in the process.

Merle won the lead role as Kitty, one corner of a love triangle in the saga set in World War I-era England. Goldwyn made “a concerted effort to align her with whiteness,” Mr. Sen said. Crew members forced Merle to undergo skin-bleaching treatments in order to appear lighter on camera. The film came out in 1935, and the reviews were glowing. The following year, Merle was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress.

This, however, would be a “quiet milestone,” Mr. Sen said. Merle couldn’t tear down the facade she had built then, or even decades later, as immigration restrictions eased up.

Merle didn’t win. The award instead went to Bette Davis for her portrayal of a blonde actress in “Dangerous.”

In the following years, Merle’s career declined. “This coincided with the popularity of color technology in American cinema,” Mr. Sen said. Because of how her skin appeared onscreen, he continued, “Merle, in fact, lost out on certain roles after she underwent color tests.”

In 1979, at age 68, Merle died of a stroke. Even after her death, her appearance — which many viewed as unconventionally attractive — remained a topic of conversation. Merle was stunning, but she did not look like Katharine Hepburn. “A diminutive 5 feet 2 inches tall, Miss Oberon was of an almost exotic beauty, with perfect skin, dark hair and a slight slant to her eyes that was further accentuated by makeup,” reads her obituary in The Times. Her South Asian heritage wasn’t publicly confirmed until 1983, with the publication of Charles Higham and Roy Moseley’s biography “Princess Merle.”

An Uphill Battle

As Merle was building her acting career during the 1930s, “the United States went through a kind of ‘India craze,’” Mr. Bald said. Even though immigration from India was heavily restricted, Americans became more interested in yoga, Eastern religions and Indian-inspired interior décor, such as wood carvings and tiger skins.

“India and Indians were simultaneously vilified and desired,” Mr. Bald said. As such, Hollywood films of that era that depicted Indian people or their culture were filled with stereotypes, or they glorified British rule.

Today the film industry is more accepting of South Asian people. “We have a rapidly growing number of South Asian American writers, directors, producers and actors working both in Hollywood and at a grass roots level, who are challenging previous narratives and creating complex, multifaceted South Asian stories,” Mr. Bald said. Consider, for example, Simone Ashley, the star of “Bridgerton”; Poorna Jagannathan, the actress in “Never Have I Ever”; and Mira Nair, the filmmaker behind “The Namesake” and “Mississippi Masala.”

But still, it remains an uphill battle.

Many roles for South Asian actors are limited to those that are one-dimensional or solely about their race. And in many ways, the tropes present in Merle’s time still persist. They “may have shifted and taken on new forms, but mainstream films and television have recycled them,” Mr. Bald said, citing the depiction of the terrorist or the model minority figure in more recent years.

What stands out looking back at Merle’s oeuvre is that she was a woman of South Asian descent who starred in roles that did not center her identity. “Here was a South Asian woman playing Anne Boleyn and Cathy from ‘Wuthering Heights,’ two roles that are canonically white,” Mr. Sen said. “You can draw a direct line between Merle’s strides and those of South Asian performers like Dev Patel playing David Copperfield.”

He added: “Her career is a statement of refusal against this notion that your racial background should determine and limit the roles that were available to you.”

This story is part of a series on how Asian Americans are shaping American popular culture. The series is funded through a grant from The Asian American Foundation. Funders have no control over the selection and focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of this series.