Join SAPAAC in celebrating author Mayukh Sen, Class of 2014, and his latest book, Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star! We will meet as a group at 6 pm at the wine bar on the first floor of McNally Jackson Books Seaport at 6 pm, 30 minutes prior to the beginning of the book launch. In order to attend, you must buy tickets directly through McNally Jackson Books.
$5 - to save a seat
$29.99 - seat + a copy of the book
ABOUT THE BOOK
A beautiful reclamation of a pioneering South Asian actress captures her glittering, complicated life and lasting impact on Hollywood.
"A deeply drawn portrait of the fascinating screen star Merle Oberon. Told with empathy and rigor, it’s also a grand tour of Hollywood’s opulence and racism through the decades. A compelling story of one woman’s struggle to make a life for herself against the odds. I could not put this book down." —Padma Lakshmi, author of Love, Loss, and What We Ate
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.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Mayukh Sen is the James Beard Award-winning author of Taste Makers. 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.
Michael Schulman is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has contributed since 2006. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and other publications. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep. His latest book is Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, a New York Times Notable Book of 2023.