Love, Queenie

Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star

15 April 2025

Territory Rights — Worldwide.

Description

A beautiful reclamation of a pioneering South Asian actress captures her glittering, complicated life and lasting impact on Hollywood

Merle Oberon attained Hollywood immortality with a nomination for a Best Leading Actress Oscar for her role in the 1935 film The Dark Angel. It was the first time a performer of colour had received an acting nomination at the Academy Awards but because Oberon concealed her South Asian identity throughout her lifetime and “passed” for white, very few people knew it. In Love, Queenie, the first biography in more than forty years of the India-born actress, Mayukh Sen draws on family interviews and previously untapped archival research to animate the Wuthering Heights star’s hard-won journey to fame. From an upbringing in poverty, she rose to the highest echelons of the film-world elite during Hollywood’s racially exclusionary Golden Age. A major biography of an often-overlooked talent, Love, Queenie empathetically captures one woman’s story while illuminating truths on race, gender and power that still resonate today.

Reviews

"Love, Queenie introduced me to a star whose life story I now find extraordinary. More, this entrancing book left me reflecting on the society which 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

"Mayukh Sen has written a deeply sympathetic portrait of one of Hollywood’s most misunderstood figures. Love, Queenie is not only a love letter to Merle Oberon’s under appreciated 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

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