Michelle’s nomination, aside from the fact that it took forever, is so refreshing to see.
We’re in a new Hollywood, where Asian cinema is celebrated, and Asian actresses are celebrated.
People don’t have to hide anymore."
Silver Screen Collection/Getty; Araya Doheny/Getty
She’s the image of British propriety, clipped accent and all.
Her family line also included Maori ancestry.
Further complicating matters, Charlotte, the woman Oberon called her mother, was actually her grandmother.
Hulton Archive/Getty
Oberon was, in fact, the child of her then 12-year-old half-sister, Constance.
“She started [passing] as a teenager,” says Bondy.
“She would do posh British accents and she would attempt to emulate the British colonizers.
United Artists/Getty
But she didn’t belong either in either world.
This included the use of a skin bleaching product that contained high levels of poisonous ammoniated mercury.
“They made her last name Oberon to make it seem obscure and vague,” says Bondy.
United Artists/Getty
“She was unplaceable.
Korda helped construct that identity and that look.
I don’t know if he applied the makeup.
Everett
I don’t know if he was the one who was like, ‘you oughta look more white.’
But Oberon went to further extremes, lying about her place of birth and lightening her skin color.
“Exotic was acceptable, but to pinpoint her as half-Maori and Sri Lankan would’ve been too much.
John Springer Collection/CORBIS/Corbis/Getty
She had to live her whole life that way.
She never really did have that triumphant moment of coming out and being proud.
That was what the studios did.
They doctored you into whatever they wanted.
If you had talent and presence, they could make you white.”
There were Asian actors open about their race during that time, most notably Anna May Wong.
“She was very convincing and opportunistic,” explains Bondy.
“She’d been that way her whole life.
She learned grit and how to get things from men from her mother.
So she had a chance of passing, and the chance of winning white American hearts.”
“Merle was not nominated that year.
So you have to think that she wasn’t entirely welcome into the Hollywood elite.”
As she aged, Oberon maintained a complicated relationship with her identity.
“We’ll never know if she truly ever reckoned with it.
She was deeply uncomfortable with [who she was].
Where does that leave Oberon’s legacy today?
Yeoh herself has been careful to credit the women and pioneers on whose shoulders she now stands.
Should that include Merle Oberon?
“Absolutely, she belongs in that pantheon,” says Bondy.
“She was a real pioneer even though nobody really knew that at the time.
“She would have a lot to wrestle with, because she was very disconnected from reality.
She would need a lot of therapy.
