What does it mean to be an Australian actress in Hollywood? For Margot Robbie, probably a juicy talk-show topic, an opportunity to explain iconic bogan slang to an international audience, a marketable bit of foreignness that lends itself to good-natured Anglophone “culture wars” over whose snacks are superior, whose accent is the real deal, or a touch of Down Under flair invariably invoked through stories of lethal bugs and animals. But first and foremost, it is a normalcy she can carry with ease. Brought into or withdrawn from view, her Australianness is neutral. Distinctive enough to be interesting, cosmopolitan enough that her international stardom appears as a natural extension.
When the Barbie star was cast as Catherine Earnshaw in yet another adaptation of Emily Bronte’s much-adapted novel Wuthering Heights, the debate centered largely on individual fit: her age, her style, her accent. Critic Angelika May did question the casting of non-Yorkshire actors, but her concern was less with Robbie’s foreignness than with the way Hollywood stardom can flatten regional specificity. She registered that Margot Robbie, the Australian Hollywood star, was crossing national borders to play an English woman, but understood the crossing as a matter of geographical distance rather than unforgivable representational transgression. Robbie could be far from the Yorkshire landscape that made Cathy’s temperament without becoming a foreign peril to the cultural world of Wuthering Heights.
Eighty-seven years ago, another Australian star played Catherine Earnshaw. Except that, for Merle Oberon, being Australian was itself part of the performance. The Australianness Margot Robbie could wear lightly as part of her celebrity became, for Oberon, the precarious foundation on which her celebrity was built.
Born in Bombay in 1911 to a British father and a Sri Lankan mother of multiple ancestries, Oberon’s relatively light skin belied the racial burden that would come to weigh heavily on her life. Growing up under the British Raj, Oberon inherited a Britishness whose imperial status promised no secure identity for those not white to the core. Individuals classified as “mixed-race” occupied an uneasy position within the colonial racial hierarchy, often standing at the margins of whiteness and alienated from both European and Indian communities. Though culturally and often visually close to Europeans, being accepted as white remained contingent on ancestry as much as appearance. Bullied in childhood and abandoned by a lover after he discovered her complex ancestry, Oberon would eventually seek to make herself a star in Hollywood, a racially selective visual business where the cosmopolitan glamour was nothing but a parochial fantasy when it came to race. Hollywood had an incredible imagination for what whiteness could become. Katharine Hepburn could become Chinese in Dragon Seed with absolute ease. But a woman of partly South Asian ancestry stepping into a leading-lady role, one whose whiteness was simply taken for granted, seemed to require rather more imagination.
To shine in a future role like Catherine Earnshaw, the young Merle Oberon, new to Hollywood, needed to readdress her “Britishness”. She turned to Australia for a more secure claim to it. Australia, a then-British subject in that same imperial world, was meanwhile becoming increasingly vehement in its defence of whiteness as Oberon came of age. In 1919, Billy Hughes took that insistence onto the global stage, opposing the proposal for racial equality at the Paris Peace Conference for fear that it would threaten the White Australia policy. A decade later, he would portray Australia as a “white island in a vast colored ocean”, welding whiteness to the very mental landscape of Australianness. This whiteness also excluded Indians from the Britishness they were supposed to share as imperial subjects. Indian migration to Australia had become increasingly difficult, and the shrinking Indian population testified to the force of that exclusion. For Oberon, however, the very Australianness produced by this exclusion offered an unexpected resource. Her Britishness could not be secured as an Indian subject of the British empire, but Australianness offered a way to affirm it.
Remote but conceivable, White Australia had been so successful a project that it could sufficiently supply the visual imagination Oberon needed. That imagination, as Angela Woollacott perceptively reads the Merle Oberon story, sustained the fiction of her whiteness. It was this Australianness Oberon borrowed when her difficult non-white life was further complicated by the visual crisis of her arrival in Hollywood. She fabricated a Tasmanian background of white ancestry, giving her passing a plausible place to begin. The rest was filmic history. To the end of her life, Merle Oberon was known as an Australian actress. This fabricated identity might bring gain or loss, but being watched while faking it is no easy thing. Opposite Laurence Olivier, Oberon delivered the untamed femininity of Wuthering Heights with captivating force. The freedom she endowed the character with was predicated precisely upon the unfree labor of disciplining her own self off screen. She relentlessly bleached her skin, disciplined her accent, and worked to hush every possible rumor about her origins. The tension of passing tells us enough: in a world so harshly defined by identities assigned in advance, one can easily displace the self in the effort to secure its place.
The racial passport of “Australianness” offered Oberon no reprieve from the racial struggle. It merely rendered that struggle private, until the day she died.
Works cited:
Higham, C., & Moseley, R. (1983). Princess Merle: The romantic life of Merle Oberon. Coward-McCann.
Hughes, W. M. The Splendid Adventure: A Review of Empire Relations Within and Without the Commonwealth of Britannic Nations. Toronto: Doubleday, Doran and Gundy, 1929.
Maclean, K. British India, White Australia: Overseas Indians, Intercolonial Relations and the Empire, 1901–1947. 2020.
May, Angelika. “Wuthering Slights: Why Are Film-Makers Afraid of Casting Yorkshire Actors as Cathy Earnshaw?” The Guardian, February 17, 2026.
Woollacott, Angela. “Colonial Origins and Audience Collusion: The Merle Oberon Story in 1930s Australia.” In Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700–Present, edited by Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott, 96–108. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.