Movies

the first Oscar nominee for Best Asian Actress who hid her heritage in Hollywood

January 27, 2023

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When Michelle Yeoh’s Best Actress Oscar nomination was announced on Tuesday, some media outlets pointed out that she was the first Asian woman to do so.

Other platforms, including NextShark, made the distinction that the actor was actually the “first person who identifies as Asian” to be nominated for the award.

It turns out that a biracial South Asian actress was the first to be nominated in the category: Hollywood star Merle Oberon.

Oberon, who was a big name celebrity in the 1930s, was discovered to have lied about his true birthplace and biracial identity after his death.

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Although his reasons for doing so are not fully known, it has been widely speculated that it was partly due to his ambition to succeed in the entertainment industry, as NextShark previously reported.

At the time, it was nearly impossible for non-white actors, especially women of color, to enter the industry. Not only was the casting of actors of color frowned upon, but there were also self-imposed industry restrictions, known as the Hays code, that made this effectively impossible.

Oberon claimed then that she was from Tasmania, an island state in Australia.

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“I was born in Tasmania but moved there as a child,” Oberon explained in a 1934 interview in The West Australian. “Since my films have been released, several people in strange parts of Australia have come to claim me as a parent…I don’t know much about them because my family argued with them there. some time.”

In fact, she was born Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson to a British father and part-Sinhalese and part-Maori mother in what is now Mumbai in 1911.

A London publicist allegedly engineered the making of her new formation, alleging that Oberon’s birth records were destroyed in a fire and that she moved to India after the death of her British father.

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Oberon started acting at the age of 9 when she joined the Calcutta Amateur Theatrical Society after her family moved to what is now Kolkata, India.

In 1928, she moved to France to pursue an acting career with the help of filmmaker Rex Ingram, who gave her small roles in his films.

Hungarian filmmaker Alexander Korda gave Oberon his big break with a small but important role as Anne Boleyn in the 1933 film “The Private Life of Henry VIII.”

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She traveled to the United States to make her first Hollywood films for Samuel Goldwyn after the success of his 1934 film ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’.

Her Best Actress Oscar nomination would come a year later, via the 1935 film “The Dark Angel.”

Another career highlight was her starring role as Catherine Earnshaw in the 1939 film “Wuthering Heights.”

Oberon’s secret was revealed shortly after he died of a stroke at age 68 in 1979.

Details of her background were first shared in the 1983 biography “Princess Merle: The Romantic Life of Merle Oberon,” by Hollywood historian Charles Higham and author Roy Moseley.

Oberon’s birth record was released in 2014 via a project between the British Library and ancestry website findmypast.co.uk.