In 1936, Merle Oberon, best known today because of her co-starring role opposite Laurence Olivier in “Wuthering Heights,” became the first Asian actress to get an Academy Award nomination, for her role in “The Dark Angel.” But in 2023, Michelle Yeoh was widely hailed as the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences’ first Asian Best Actress winner. That is because Oberon hid her ethnicity from journalists and the public for her entire career in order to have a career at all. It worked: in addition to getting the much-sought role of Kathy in “Wuthering Heights,” Oberon played Anne Boleyn (in the Charles Laughton classic, “The Private Life of Henry VIII”) at a time when non-traditional casting was unheard of.

Oberon died of a stroke in 1979; it wasn’t until four years later that it was revealed that she had been born in Bombay, India, the daughter of an Indian woman who had been raped by a white man. Written before the secret was revealed, the Times obituary seems naive in retrospect: “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.” Almost!

Because the facts of Oberon’s heritage were revealed in a biography that didn’t attract much attention, most Americans, even film buffs, don’t know about Oberon’s secret, which she went to extreme lengths to keep hidden. In 1929, aspiring to get into the movies, she moved from Calcutta to England while pretending to be the wife of an English jockey she was romantically involved with; the jockey paid for her to come to England. Merle’s sister Charlotte, who was darker-skinned and couldn’t pass for white, came with her and pretended to be Merle’s servant.

Studio executive Alexander Korda saw star potential in Oberon and concocted her fake biography: she was the daughter of two European parents and had been born while they were living in Tasmania. After success in English films she moved to Hollywood in 1934, and survived gossip and rumors that the exotic beauty was a “half-breed”. When Samuel Goldwyn, the independent film producer who specialized in blurring ethnicity (he made Danny Kaye dye his hair blonde to appear less Jewish and had changed his own name to “Goldwyn” from “Goldfisch,”) decided to star Oberon in “The Dark Angel,” he forced her to undergo skin-bleaching treatments so she would appear lighter-complexioned on camera. Merle was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for the 1935 film…a first, but no one but Oberon’s close associates knew it.

At the conclusion of the New York Times story that recounts Oberon’s strange saga, the paper quotes Mayukh Sennew, author of a new Oberon biography “Love, Queenie.” “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,” he says. That’s a rather contrived analysis of the situation today, when white actors are seldom allowed to play the role of an of-color character. Today an actress like Oberon would have prove she was South Asian to have a chance at playing Merle Oberon in the movie adaptation of “Love Queenie.”

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Source: New York Times