R.I.P. Anna Kashfi

[Reza]

Anna Kashfi, 80, Actress and Brando's First Wife

by Bruce Weber New York Times 8/26/2015

Anna Kashfi, an actress who appeared in several Hollywood films in parts calling for, in the parlance of the day, an exotic beauty, but who became better known for playing a continuing role in a real-life soap opera as Marlon Brando's first wife, died on Aug. 16 in Woodland, Wash. She was 80.

Brett Dundas, the chief deputy coroner for Cowlitz County, in southwestern Washington, confirmed the death without specifying the cause.

Ms. Kashfi, who had a caramel complexion and dark eyes, was one of the more confounding figures in 1950s Hollywood. She married Brando in October 1957, having met him, by her own account, two years earlier in the commissary of Paramount Pictures while making her first movie, "The Mountain." He was 33 when they wed; she was 10 years younger, and already pregnant with their son, Christian.

Sources agree that she was born on Sept. 30, 1934, but that is all they agree on regarding her background.

Presumed to be, as was widely reported, the daughter of an Indian architect, Ms. Kashfi hid at least parts of her upbringing (and seemingly invented parts, as well).

Shortly after the marriage was announced, a man named William O'Callaghan, then living in Cardiff, Wales, declared that Ms. Kashfi was his daughter and that she was born in Darjeeling and raised in Calcutta while he was working for the Indian state railroad. Other news organizations reported that she was baptized in Calcutta. Mr. O'Callaghan said that his daughter took the name Kashfi, one she made up, when she was given the role in "The Mountain," in which she played a young Hindu woman, the lone survivor of a plane crash in what appear to be the French Alps.

Numerous news reports subsequently said that Ms. Kashfi's real name was Joan O'Callaghan. The New York Times, citing immigration records, said that Ms. Kashfi had given her name as Joanna O'Callaghan when she came to the United States to make the film.

Years later, Ms. Kashfi wrote a memoir, "Brando for Breakfast," in which she said that her mother, Selma Ghose, gave birth to her in Calcutta after "an unregistered alliance" with her father, Devi Kashfi, an architect, after which her mother married Mr. O'Callaghan.

At 18, Ms. Kashfi wrote, she was sent to study economics in England, when her mother and stepfather were living in Wales. She never finished school and was working as a model when the director Edward Dmytryk cast her in "The Mountain."

One reason for her casting may have been her slight build; she did not have any lines in English and never had to stand up, but had to be carried to safety by the film's star, Spencer Tracy, who was then in his mid-50s.

"Goodbye, Hindu lady," Tracy's character says to her, after her rescue.

Ms. Kashfi's memoir, published in 1979, was a blistering tell-all in which she savaged Brando as sexually incompetent and perverse, as well as belligerent, narcissistic and unreliable. The marriage had not lasted long; the pair separated after less than a year and divorced in 1959.

They then embarked on an acrimonious battle for custody of Christian that went on for nearly 15 years and included numerous court appearances. After one of them, Ms. Kashfi slapped Brando across the face in front of reporters and photographers.

Ms. Kashfi's other films included "Battle Hymn" (1957), a Korean War drama with Rock Hudson in which she played a Korean; "Cowboy" (1958), a western with Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon in which she played a Mexican; and "Night of the Quarter Moon" (1959), a drama about racial intermarriage in which she played a black woman (her husband was played by Nat King Cole) who warns her friend, a part-black character (played by Julie London) in love with a white man, about prevailing social attitudes.

"When you have one little drop of African blood in you, just one little drop, and they find out, you're Negro, just as my husband and I," she says.

Ms. Kashfi, who lived in Kalama, Wash., married a Los Angeles businessman, James Hannaford, in 1974; he died in 1987. She was identified by Mr. Dundas, the coroner, as Anna K. Hannaford.

Marlon Brando died in 2004. Christian Brando had a troubled life, mottled by drug and alcohol abuse. In 1990, he shot and killed a man named Dag Drollet, who was the boyfriend of his half sister, Cheyenne Brando. Convicted of manslaughter, he spent five years in prison. He died in 2008.

Ms. Kashfi is survived by Christian's son, Michael.