In 2022, Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian actress to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. But she wasn’t the first actress of Asian origin to be nominated. In 1935, Merle Oberon was nominated for Best Actress for the role of Kitty Vane in The Dark Angel, only her second film in the US film industry.

But no one knew Oberon was Asian. Her public biography said she was born to white parents in Tasmania, eventually moving to India and, from there, to the UK. But Merle Oberon, in truth, was of Anglo-Indian origin, born in Bombay. She’d hidden her heritage to get around US censorship and immigration laws—a secret she took to her grave, even if many in the industry suspected the truth.

Mayukh Sen tackles Oberon’s life in Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star. Mayukh Sen is the James Beard Award-winning author of Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (WW Norton, 2021). He is a 2025 Fellow at New America, and has written on film for the New Yorker, the Atlantic and the Criterion Collection. He teaches journalism at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Nicholas Gordon has an MPhil from Oxford in International Relations and a BA from Harvard. He is a writer, editor and occasional radio host based in Hong Kong.