Entertainment Weekly

The tragic history of the first Asian woman nominated for Best Actress, over 85 years before Michelle Yeoh

When Michelle Yeoh was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once, the overdue honor came with an appalling statistic: Yeoh is the first Asian woman to be nominated in ...
The Atlantic

Merle Oberon Was Way, Way Ahead of Her Time

In 1935, a young actor named Merle Oberon landed the role of a lifetime. The Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn was planning to remake the 1925 silent film The Dark Angel as a talkie. Oberon, with her ...
The New York Times

A Hollywood Star With a Secret That Could Have Ended Her Career

Merle Oberon was a popular actress who was once nominated for an Oscar. But a fact that she hid from the public threatened to unspool her entire life’s work. Merle Oberon in the 1935 Oscar-nominated ...
Los Angeles Times

Why Merle Oberon, ‘Hollywood’s first South Asian star,’ kept her race a secret

Golden Age film star Merle Oberon comes alive in a breezy new biography, sparked in part by the 2023 news that she was half Asian, a secret she kept all her life. When Michelle Yeoh was nominated for ...