Marlon Brando’s wife was born in Darjeeling!!

Marlon with first wife, Anna Kashfi

PHOTOGRAPH : Fine Young Cannibal (FLICKR)

From Wikipedia

“….Anna Kashfi (born Johanna O'Callaghan on 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.

According to Mr. and Mrs. William Patrick O'Callaghan of Cardiff, Wales, who was interviewed by The New York Times in October 1957, Kashfi was their estranged daughter, born Joan O'Callaghan in Darjeeling, raised in Calcutta and Wales where the family moved in 1947.

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 (i.e. her parents never married.) The 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

Kashfi married Marlon Brando on 11 October 1957, and they were divorced on 22 April 1959. According to The New York Times (14 October 1957), though Kashfi's parents had been identified as the O'Callaghans', she did not identify them as her parents on her marriage license, instead stating that her father was Devi Kashfi and her mother was Selma Ghose; a friend of the bride stated that Kashfi's purported Indian father had died six weeks before the Brandos' wedding.

The Brandos had a son, Christian Devi Brando, (1958-2008), and fought bitterly over custody of the boy, with Brando eventually obtaining custody. Kashfi married James Hannaford, a salesman, in 1974; he later died. In the 1990s, her son, Christian, whom she called "Devi," was tried for killing his half-sister Cheyenne Brando's boyfriend Dag Drollet. Christian Brando died of pneumonia in Los Angeles in January 2008 at the age of 49.

Christian was born in Los Angeles, California on May 11, 1958, the product of an affair between Marlon Brando and Anna Kashfi, an actress. Marlon and Kashfi met in 1955, and Kashfi became pregnant in 1957. They married in 1958. Marlon later claimed that he had married Kashfi only because of the pregnancy and that he had other romantic relationships during the marriage. Kashfi was an abuser of barbiturates and alcohol. The couple divorced a year after Christian's birth.”