Anna Kashfi was born Joan O'Callaghan on 30 September 1934 in Calcutta (now Kolkata), British India, to William Patrick O'Callaghan, a railway traffic superintendent, and his wife Martha. When she was around 13 the family relocated to Cardiff, Wales, where her father worked first as a waiter and then in a butcher's shop. She later moved to London, where she reinvented herself as a model under the stage name "Anna Kashfi", presenting herself as exotic and of Indian heritage.
Her Welsh background became a matter of public record and dispute in 1957, when her marriage to Hollywood star Marlon Brando triggered press investigations into her past. The New York Times ran a piece headlined "Kashfi Called Welsh", and reporters traced her to her O'Callaghan family in Cardiff, including a brother then studying at a technical college there. Kashfi herself always maintained a different, more elaborate account of her parentage, and the true story of her origins remains disputed to this day, but her family's years living and working in Cardiff are well documented.
On screen, Kashfi appeared with major stars of the era, including Spencer Tracy in The Mountain (1956), Rock Hudson in Battle Hymn (1957) and Nat King Cole in Night of the Quarter Moon (1959), for which she won a Best Supporting Actress award at the Cartagena Film Festival. Her marriage to Brando, which produced a son, Christian, was brief and stormy, ending in divorce in 1959, and her acting career wound down soon after amid well-publicised personal difficulties.
Kashfi later remarried and settled in the United States. She died on 16 August 2015 in Woodland, Washington, aged 80.