Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography One of Publishers Weekly and Booklist's Best Books of 2025 “Extraordinary."― The New York Times Book Review A beautiful reclamation of a pioneering South Asian actress captures her glittering, complicated life and lasting impact on Hollywood. Merle Oberon made history when she was announced as a nominee for the Best Actress Oscar in 1936. Hers was a face that “launched a thousand ships,” a so-called exotic beauty who the camera loved and fans adored. Her nomination for The Dark Angel marked the first time the Academy recognized a performer of color. Almost ninety years before actress Michelle Yeoh would triumph in the same category, Oberon, born to a South Asian mother and white father in India, broke through a racial barrier―but no one knew it. Oberon was “passing” for white. In the first biography of Oberon (1911–1979) in more than forty years, Mayukh Sen draws on family interviews and heretofore untapped archival material to capture the exceptional life of an oft-forgotten talent. Born into poverty, Queenie Thompson dreamt of big-screen stardom. By sheer force of will, she immigrated to London in her teens and met film mogul Alexander Korda, who christened her “Merle Oberon” and invented the story that she was born to European parents in Tasmania. Her new identity was her ticket into Hollywood. When she was only in her twenties, Oberon dazzled as Cathy in Wuthering Heights opposite Laurence Olivier. Against the backdrop of Hollywood’s racially exclusionary Golden Age and the United States’s hostile immigration policy towards South Asians in the twentieth century, Oberon rose to the highest echelons of the film-world elite, all while keeping a secret that could have destroyed her career. Tracing Oberon’s story from her Indian roots to her final days surrounded by wealth and glamor, Sen questions the demands placed on stars in life and death. His compassionate, compelling chronicle illuminates troubling truths on race, gender, and power that still resonate today. 20 images "'What does America want from its stars when they come from the margins?' Sen asks in this extraordinary account of the hardship and rampant racism Oberon, a movie star who spent her entire career hiding her South Asian roots, faced during Hollywood’s golden age." ― New York Times Book Review "The chroniclers of classic-era Hollywood have never quite known what to do with Merle Oberon….So it takes chutzpah and sympathy to write a biography about Oberon, but Mayukh Sen has both." ― Ty Burr, Wall Street Journal "In Love, Queenie , writer Mayukh Sen cheerfully reclaims her story, narrating it with sensitivity and verve….[T]he book is written as if living alongside Oberon during her lifetime, giving emotional heft to her sometimes difficult choices." ― Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times "With fluid pacing, Sen traces the 'culture of exclusion' of the times that hobbled and channeled Oberon’s life and career….Sen’s story shines throughout. The narrative is woven with surgical precision, never flaunting the obvious depth of its research." ― Akanksha Singh, Los Angeles Review of Books "Biographer Mayukh Sen…uses a compassionate lens….It could be tempting to dismiss Oberon as a self-absorbed, money-driven diva who acquired and shed lovers and husbands like outgrown fashions. But Sen elegantly and thoroughly performs a work of historical recovery for a subject whose uniqueness has never been fully understood or appreciated." ― Kendra Nordin Beato, Christian Science Monitor "Merle Oberon, one of Hollywood’s first South Asian movie stars, gets her due in this engrossing biography, which masterfully explores Oberon’s painful upbringing, complicated racial identity, and much more." ― Sophia M. Stewart, The Millions "Throughout every up and down of Oberon’s career, Sen pays her―and his readers―the implicit compliment of not turning his subject into a saint…. Love, Queenie is earnestly affectionate but pulls none of these punches, which makes it both bracing and refreshing reading, the year’s first genuinely worthwhile movie star biography. All previous studies of this troubled, fascinating figure can be readily retired." ― Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review "Her story was alluring enough to become the subject of biographies, novel and television mini-series. Yet nothing fully captured her drive, spirit and audacity. But now a farm-fresh biography, Love, Queenie by Mayukh Sen, locates, contextualises and explains Merle Oberon like none before...Sen guides us through every bend of her life, seeing her with a sympathetic lens." ― Avijit Ghosh, Times of India "[A] scrupulous and moving biography….Oberon’s elan embosses Sen’s easy and engaging prose….Thanks to Sen’s insightful, compassionate, and historically-attuned narrative skill, the significance of Oberon’s signature is legible beyond the page." ― Sumaiya Aftab Ahmed, Met