Anna Kashfi

Anna Kashfi appeared in several films, including *The Mountain* (1956), co-starring Spencer Tracy, and *Battle Hymn* (1957), co-starring Rock Hudson. She is best known, however, as Marlon Brando's first wife. Although often perceived as Indian, Kashfi is the daughter of a Welsh factory worker, William O'Callaghan, and she later reinvented herself to enhance her screen appeal. In her 1979 memoir, Kashfi maintained the claim that she is of Indian descent, asserting that she is the result of an "unregistered alliance" between Selma Ghose and an Indian architect named Devi Kashfi, with William O'Callaghan being her stepfather. She met Brando in 1955 at the Paramount commissary, and after an on-again, off-again relationship—largely due to Brando's numerous romantic entanglements—they married in 1957. Brando reportedly married her because she had become pregnant. The couple had a son, Christian, born in May 1958, who gained notoriety in 1990 for fatally shooting Dag Drollet, a crime for which he received a ten-year prison sentence. Kashfi divorced Brando in 1959. She later married a Los Angeles businessman, James Hannaford, in 1974, but he died in 1987. Kashfi outlived both her first husband, Marlon Brando (who died in 2004), and their son Christian (who died in 2008). She passed away on August 16, 2015, at the age of 80 in Washington State, USA, due to natural causes.