Anna Kashfi, the first wife of Marlon Brando, has died. She was 80-years-old.
TMZ was the first to report the news of Kashfi’s death , and revealed that she passed away in Kalama, Washington. As of Friday, August 21, no further details as to how, or when, she died have been released.
Kashfi married Marlon Brando in 1957, not long after meeting him at the commissary at Paramount Studios the previous year. Brando once described Kashfi as “probably the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known,” according to the Daily Mail .
Marlon Brando’s First Wife Anna Kashfi Dead — British Actress Dies at 80 http://t.co/oIoAMuxPkh #CelebrityHour pic.twitter.com/7Acn9RiVuX
— #CelebrityHour (@CelebrityHour) August 22, 2015
Soon after, the former couple welcomed their first and only child together, Christian Brando, in 1958. Despite their whirlwind romance, it didn’t last long. In 1959, the couple filed for divorce and started a lengthy and brutal custody battle. Brando eventually won full custody of his son.
#RIP Anna Kashfi First wife of Marlon Brando. She was the only survivor in Spencer Tracy film THE MOUNTAIN pic.twitter.com/2REI8c83XP
— Rhett Bartlett (@dialmformovies) August 21, 2015
Anna started her acting career in 1956 when she starred in The Mountain alongside Spencer Tracy and then in Battle Hymn with Rock Hudson. She was born in India in 1934, and was raised in Great Britain. Although her parents William Patrick O’Callaghan, who was Irish, and Phoebe Melinda, often refuted her claims, Anna referred to herself as having an Indian heritage.
@dialmformovies She was one of the Korean women in charge of the orphan shelter in BATTLE HYMN (1957) pic.twitter.com/uy3GCmc4sm
— Rhett Bartlett (@dialmformovies) August 21, 2015
In 1979, Anna Kashfi penned a tell-all book about her time being married to the legendary actor titled, Brando for Breakfast. However, prior to that, she remarried a man named James Hannaford.
Brando’s and Kashfi’s son, Christian Brando, made headlines in 1990 after he shot and killed Dag Drollet, the boyfriend of his half-sister Cheyenne, at Brando’s mansion in Los Angeles. Christain pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter and served six years in prison of his ten year sentence.
“I think I perhaps failed him as a father. The tendency is to blame the other parent. But I am certain there were things I could have done differently,” Marlon, who died in 2004 at the age of 80, said of his son, during an emotional court testimony.
A year before he was release from prison, in 1996, Cheyenne, then 25, hung herself at her mother Tarita Teriipaia’s home in Tahiti. Christian later died in 2008 from double pneumonia. He was only 49-years-old.
[Photo by Keystone/Getty Images]
