Showing results for "Queenie" in Biographies & Memoirs

Merle Oberon made history when she was announced as a nominee for the Best Actress Oscar in 1936. Her nomination marked the first time the Academy recognized a performer of color. Oberon, born to a South Asian mother and white father, broke through a racial barrier—but no one knew it. Oberon was "passing" for white. In the first biography of Oberon in more than forty years, Mayukh Sen draws on family interviews and untapped archival material to capture the life of an oft-forgotten talent.

Thanks to a friend of his, broadcaster and journalist Magnus Finch comes into receipt of a batch of mini-discs containing interviews with an extraordinary character - Queenie, one of Britian's most notorious violent offenders. This is a man that was born into a privileged background but, in the 1980s, he embarks on a life as a hardened violent criminal. Finch tracks down relatives, former colleagues, cell mates, those in the prison system and psychologists, to try to better understand what made this seemingly rather effete man from a rarified world decide that he would become one of Britain's ...