French-Iranian author, director, illustrator and activist Marjane Satrapi, best known for her graphic novel series and film Persepolis, has died aged 56, the Élysée Palace in Paris has confirmed.
She “captivated a global audience with Persepolis”, the palace said, calling her “a leading figure in French culture and an artist devoted to freedom, whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international renown”.
Persepolis, first published in 2000, follows the story of a young girl growing up during and after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, also known as the Islamic Revolution. Eight years later, the film adaptation was nominated for best animated feature at the Oscars, having been co-directed by Satrapi.
News agency AFP quoted a “member of her close circle” as saying she had “died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life”.
The palace added: “With her childlike perspective, her irony, her tenderness, and her inner demons, the author created a deeply moving world with which readers identified.”
Satrapi was an outspoken critic of Iran’s government, and Persepolis depicts her childhood in the Iranian capital of Tehran, struggling under the rules imposed by Iran’s Islamic leadership following the 1979 revolution.
It then goes on to follow her as she is sent to Europe by her parents to begin a life in exile.
The film version stars Chiara Mastroianni as young Marjane and Catherine Deneuve as her mother.
Studio Canal UK posted a tribute on X, remembering the “brilliant” and “extraordinary artist and filmmaker behind Persepolis”.
They noted: “Through this deeply personal and powerful film, she gave audiences a story of identity, freedom, exile and resistance that continues to resonate across the world.”
Satrapi studied in Austria for four years as a teenager at the prestigious Lycée Français de Vienne.
She returned home for a period, after a serious bout of bronchitis, to find a much changed Tehran – as depicted in the second book in the Persepolis series.
She gained a master’s degree in visual communication from the Islamic Azad University in Tehran, and also married but then divorced.
Her parents urged her to leave Iran and return to Europe, which she did, moving to France to further her education at the Haute School Arts Du Rhin in Strasbourg.
After more than a decade in the country, she gained French nationality in 2006, but last year refused the French legion d’honneur – the French equivalent of an OBE – over what she called her beloved adopted country’s “hypocrisy” in its dealings with her home nation.
She supported protests for freedom and rights against the regime in Iran.
In the wake of the Woman Life Freedom protests – launched in Iran in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the morality police for not wearing her hijab properly – Satrapi told Deadline how her parents had previously taken to the streets to protest the regime’s imposition of the hijab for women in 1983.
“He was one of the very few men; they didn’t understand at the time that women’s rights are society’s rights,” she said of her father.
She also revealed she had received threats and slurs from the regime regarding Persepolis and her activism.
“I’ve been called a liar and a spy. I’ve learned in life not to be scared,” she says. “It’s not that you don’t feel fear; you feel the fear, but then you decide whether you care about it or not.
“It’s not that I’m fearless or careless but there are kids in my country who are being shot and they are 17 years old, while I have lived for more than half a century.”
In 2023, she led a protest outside the Iranian embassy in Paris in solidarity with five Tehran teenagers who were arrested for posting a TikTok video dancing to the Rema and Selena Gomez song Calm Down.
“We artists must be humble but doing nothing is worse, being indifferent is worse,” she said. “I don’t think what I’m doing is huge or immense but I have a voice, I have a face and I’m known in France, I’m just doing what I have to do.”
Her other film credits included 2014 horror comedy The Voices, starring Ryan Reynolds as a factory worker with schizophrenia, whose hallucinations drive him to commit murder.
She also directed a biopic of the pioneering Polish-French physicist and chemist Marie Curie, entitled Radioactive; as well as Poulet aux Prunes (2011) and La Bande des Jotas (2012). Her other novels include Embroiderie and Woman, Life, Freedom.
Satrapi’s husband, a Swedish producer, actor and screenwriter, died last year and she recently published a series of heartfelt Instagram posts saying: “For I Lost the love of my life”.
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