Anna Kashfi (born 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.
Early life and origins
Johanna O'Callaghan was born in
Darjeeling and raised in
Calcutta and, later,
Cardiff, Wales, where the family moved in 1947.
["Kashfi Called Welsh", The New York Times, 13 October 1957] William P. O'Callaghan was a
London-born steel worker of Irish descent, who had been a traffic superintendent on the Indian State railways; his wife was English and told the press
"there is no Indian blood in my family or my husband's family".
In her book,
Brando for Breakfast, published in 1979, however, Kashfi claimed that she really is half-Indian and that the press incorrectly believed that William O'Callaghan was her real father when he was, she stated, her stepfather. Kashfi wrote that her biological father was Indian and that she was the result of an "unregistered alliance" between her parents. Film director
Edward Dmytryk, who directed the actress in her first film, stated that he knew her real surname was Irish but he said he assumed that she was half-Indian.
