Anna Kashfi

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anna Kashfi
Image:BSR2.jpeg
Birth name	Joan O'Callaghan
Born	September 30 1934 (1934-09-30) (age 75) Calcutta, British India Image:Imperial-India-Blue-Ensign.svg
Spouse(s)	Marlon Brando (1957-1959) James Hannaford (1974-???)

Anna Kashfi (born Joan O'Callaghan on September 30, 1934) is a former film actress, who had a brief Hollywood career in the 1950s and is best known for having been married to Marlon Brando.

She was born in Calcutta. She moved to Wales at the end of the British Raj in 1947. She has been reported to have been the daughter of a Welsh steel worker of Irish descent, William O'Callaghan who had been superintendent on the Indian State railways. However, in her book, Brando for Breakfast, published in 1979, she claimed that she really is half-Indian and that the press incorrectly thought that her stepfather William O'Callaghan was her real father. She explained that her real father was Indian and that she was the result of an "unregistered alliance" between her parents (i.e. her parents never married.)

She worked as a waitress in Cardiff before moving to London where she became a model^[1] She created the Anna Kashfi persona in order to be noticed and to increase her chances of film success.

She made her screen appearance as a Hindu girl in The Mountain (1956) for Paramount with Spencer Tracy and Robert Wagner. Her next film saw her co-starred with Rock Hudson as a Korean girl in Battle Hymn (1957). This was followed by Cowboy (1958) with Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon in which she played a Mexican. Her next and last film during this period was Night of the Quarter Moon (1959). She also made a few appearances on television, including the series Adventures in Paradise.

She married Marlon Brando on 11 October 1957 and they were divorced on 22 April 1959. They had a son, Christian Brando, (b. 11 May 1958). She would marry a second time and become a widow. In the 1990s, her son Christian, whom she calls "Devi," was tried for killing his half-sister Cheyenne Brando's boyfriend. Tabloids found a bloated Kashfi living in a trailer grieving for her son.

In 1979, Kashfi published an account of her marriage to Brando, the aforementioned Brando for Breakfast.