An actress of exotic beauty who played Indian, Korean, Mexican and African-American characters, Anna Kashfi caught the eye of Marlon Brando during her brief Hollywood career.
She was working in a shop near Piccadilly Circus in London — selling Indian saris, scarves and bangles — when she was persuaded to audition for a role as an aeroplane crash survivor in the 1956 drama The Mountain. Rescuing her, Spencer Tracy had to carry her down the eponymous slope and said that whoever won the role had to be light in weight.
Edward Dmytryk, the director, hired her on first sight. It was while making The Mountain that she met Brando (obituary, July 3, 2004) on the Paramount lot. They began dating and the studio publicity machine moved into action, making known their romance. Brando was smitten and said she was probably the most beautiful woman he had ever met. The feelings were reciprocated, though Tracy told her: “Anna, you’re making the biggest mistake of your life.” The relationship survived Brando’s lengthy absence while he made The Teahouse of the August Moon in Japan, and her confinement in hospital for three months with tuberculosis. When Brando returned he charmed her by visiting the hospital in full Japanese make-up, pretending to be a Japanese doctor.
They married in 1957 when she was already pregnant with their son Christian, but suddenly the romance turned sour. It did not help that Kashfi told a gossip columnist that Brando was a “clumsy” lover. Within two years they were fighting in the courts. Kashfi was photographed attacking Brando at one hearing. An acrimonious divorce was followed by a custody battle.
During one hearing Brando dramatically revealed that he had secretly married for a second time, in Mexico to Movita Castaneda (obituary, Mar 2, 2015), an older Mexican-American actress.
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There seems little doubt that Anna Kashfi was born in India in 1934, probably in Calcutta, but there is considerable uncertainty over whether her father was an amorous Indian called Devi Kashfi or an English railway worker by the name of William O’Callaghan.
She listed Indian parents on the marriage certificate when she married Brando. However, O’Callaghan emerged in the press claiming he was shocked to read about Brando’s Indian bride. “That’s our daughter,” he said, “and both me and ‘Missus’ were born in London.” He claimed that she was Joan O’Callaghan, born when he was working on the Bengal- Nagpur railway as a superintendent, and that she spent her early years in India before the family moved to Cardiff.
After moving to Wales in her early teens she went to a convent school and then worked in a butcher’s shop, before trying to break into modelling. It was suggested that Glyn Mortimer, the head of a London modelling agency, helped her to reinvent herself as the Indian beauty Anna Kashfi. She herself would later come up with a third version of the story in her 1979 memoirs Brando for Breakfast, in which she said that she was the offspring of an “unregistered alliance” that O’Callaghan’s wife Melinda had with an Indian man; O’Callaghan, she asserted, was her stepfather.
After her divorce from Brando, Kashfi made only a handful of films and a few television appearances. She had drug and alcohol problems and retired in the early 1960s. She married for a second time in 1974, to a salesman called James Hannaford. He died in 1986.
Brando (who had 16 children in total) eventually won custody of Christian. Their son made headlines in the 1990s when he was charged with murdering the boyfriend of his half-sister, Cheyenne, Brando’s daughter from his third marriage. Christian claimed a gun went off accidentally and served five years for manslaughter. He died of pneumonia in 2008. Kashfi’s death ends another chapter in their mysterious and tragic family saga.
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Anna Kashfi, actress, was born on September 30, 1934. She died on August 16, 2015, aged 80