When Michelle Yeoh was nominated for a best actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), news reports placed her as the first “Asian-identifying” nominee in that category, a curious designation explained by a nominee from the distant past: Merle Oberon, who was nominated for best actress for The Dark Angel in 1935. Oberon had been born in Bombay in 1911 into severe poverty and was known as Queenie O’Brien in her youth. Her grandmother Charlotte, who was Eurasian, assumed the role of mother because Charlotte’s own daughter Constance was just 12 years old when she gave birth to Queenie.
Queenie came up in a background of sexual exploitation and brutal ethnic shaming; she left a private school when the other girls taunted her about her mixed race heritage, and we cannot know all the struggles she endured as she worked her way up as a club hostess and eventually got herself to Paris and then England, where she took the name Merle Oberon. Charlotte accompanied her on these trips, and Oberon, intent on passing for white, pretended that the darker-skinned Charlotte was her maid.
The producer Alexander Korda took an interest in Oberon and gave her a small showcase part as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), where she emphasized the anger Boleyn feels as she is led to her execution. Oberon was extraordinarily beautiful in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), with hints of wantonness and sexual abandon in her manner, and in her first Hollywood movie Folies Bergère (1935) Oberon is somewhere on the fence visually between acknowledging her heritage and passing, as if this is a crucial moment when she must decide how she is going to present herself.
Given the time period, the choice to her was made obvious. Oberon could not have been cast in romantic leading roles if her mixed race background had been made known; the Hays Office censorship board had specific prohibitions against so-called miscegenation on screen, and this is what eventually hobbled the career of Anna May Wong. Oberon keeps widening her eyes in Folies Bergère in order to indicate Anglo-ness, and there is a sad desperation about this.
So for producer Samuel Goldwyn the young actress played the part of a veddy British beauty with just a hint of “exoticism” in her face but not in her manner. In The Dark Angel, Oberon became a star even though she is deliberately presenting the dullest and most respectable-seeming surface to the camera, and this is what makes her one of the strangest screen actors of this period. Oberon is an undoubted star; she has that kind of authority on screen. But the catch is that she must behave and sound “like a lady” to such a constricting extent that it’s like watching someone trying to dance a waltz in a straitjacket.
Oberon did have some talent as an actress, even though her emotional scenes in The Dark Angel don’t come off because she is too tense with the effort of passing to open herself up. She is stunningly beautiful, and with some intimations again of wantonness, in the surviving footage from Josef von Sternberg’s I, Claudius (1937), which was abandoned when Oberon got into a car crash. And then she made her classic movie, Wuthering Heights (1939), a romance in which she was given a great role as the proud and self-destructive Cathy, a great director (William Wyler), a great co-star (Laurence Olivier), a great cinematographer (Gregg Toland), and a great score from Alfred Newman to underline and supply emotion.
All these elements were in her favor, but Oberon herself had to deliver the passion in the romance, and she does this surprisingly well given her limitations in other parts and all the personal pressures she had to live with. Surely Oberon understood Cathy’s ruinous pre-occupation with appearance and respectability, and Wyler helps her with careful editing, so that she does many of the important moments in short bursts. Toland also helps her tremendously by having her face lit by lightning from outside a window for the key moment when Cathy concludes of the love of her life, “I am Heathcliff!” Oberon disliked Olivier, and luckily their mutual dislike reads as chemistry, though there are times when she inevitably seems smaller, chillier, and self-enclosed in the same shots when he bores through her with his burningly intense, ambitious, demanding eyes. For the long deathbed scene, Wyler wore her down with his many-take method and got her to be open and vulnerable and even a touch crazy, yet controlled.
Oberon received similar careful handling when she did a comedy for Ernst Lubitsch called That Uncertain Feeling (1941), for Lubitsch liked to act out all the parts for his actors in detail. She throws herself into the lead role in Julien Duvivier’s Lydia (1941) to such an extent that she often seems tensely amateurish, and as George Sand in the Technicolor biopic A Song to Remember (1945), Oberon appears to be trying to personalize a big scene where she lays herself bare to her lover Chopin (Cornel Wilde), but director Charles Vidor does not help her to shape what she is trying to do.
Oberon scored once again in a small royal part, the Empress Josephine in Désirée (1954), where she is beautiful as ever in color and movingly conscious of time passing and being passed over for a younger woman. She remained active socially in Hollywood, and in later years she made two camp classics ten years apart: Of Love and Desire (1963), where Oberon showed off her ageless beauty in her early fifties and did a delirious scene towards the end where every male in the film seems to identify her as a sexual wanton on sight, and Interval (1973), in which she plays a hilariously nature-loving free spirit named Serena Moore who opens herself up to love with a younger man played by Robert Wolders, who became Oberon’s last lover and companion. “Are you a statue, or are you real?” Wolders asks her at one point.
It was clear at the end of her life, in the late 1970s, that the pressure of passing was not something that had in any way relaxed for Oberon. It was important to her to maintain to the end the masquerade that had let her go right to the top of her profession. The struggle she endured was a cruel one, and it is receiving more attention now than it did in the immediate aftermath of her death in 1979. It is an open question today whether Oberon felt that the triumph of her Cathy in Wuthering Heights was worth what she had to endure to get it.