Anna Kashfi was born as Joan O’Callaghan in Darjeeling, India, to William Patrick O’Callaghan, a traffic superintendent on the Indian State railways, who was from London but of Irish descent, and his wife, Phoebe. She was raised in Calcutta until she was 13, when the family relocated to Cardiff, Wales. Upon her family’s relocation to Wales, O’Callaghan worked as a waitress and in a butcher shop in Cardiff before moving to London, where she became a model. She made her screen debut as an actress in 1956 in The Mountain (1956) for Paramount with Spencer Tracy and Robert Wagner. Using the stage name Anna Kashfi, the twenty-two-year-old played a Hindu girl. In her next film a year later, Battle Hymn (1957), she co-starred with Rock Hudson as a Korean girl. A year after that she played a Mexican in Cowboy (1958) with Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon. Her next and last film during this period was Night of the Quarter Moon (1959), where she played the African American wife of singer Nat King Cole. She made a few appearances on television, including the series Adventures in Paradise, though drug and alcohol problems reportedly contributed to the premature end of her acting career. Kashfi married Marlon Brando, whom she had met in the summer of 1956, on October 11, 1957. They divorced a year and a half later on April 22, 1959. They had a son, Christian Devi Brando (1958–2008), whom she called “Devi”. Kashfi and Marlon fought bitterly over Christian, with Marlon eventually winning custody. In the 1990s, Christian was tried for killing his half-sister Cheyenne’s boyfriend. Jailed for the crime, he later died of pneumonia in Los Angeles in 2008, aged 49. Kashfi married James Hannaford, a salesman, in 1974. Kashfi had one grandson, Michael Brando (born 1988). Kashfi died on August 16, 2015, in Woodland, Washington. She was 80, and is survived by her grandson, Michael Brando. She died six months after Brando’s second wife Movita Castaneda died on February 12, 2015, in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 98.