Marjane Satrapi, Author of “Persepolis,” Dies at 56
4June 5, 2026
Iranian-French filmmaker and authorMarjane Satrapi, whose graphic novel series and filmPersepolis, introduced the Western world to the precarity of everyday life in the wake of the Islamic Revolution, died on June 3. She was fifty-six. Her death was announced by French president Emmanuel Macron. Satrapi’s family and close friends in a statement to AFP newswire attributed the cause as “sadness” following the death last year of her husband, producer, actor, and screenwriter Mattias Ripa. “Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and a freedom-loving artist whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim,” said Macron in a statement.
Marjane Satrapiwas born on November 22, 1969, in Rasht, in northwestern Iran, near the Caspian Sea, and grew up in Tehran. Her father was an engineer and her mother a dress designer. The family was politically active and decidedly left-leaning, campaigning vigorously against the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, and then, following the Islamic Revolution, against that of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Satrapi was nine when Khomeini came to power and found the restrictions imposed by the regime of the Islamic Republic unbearable. Among these were the rule that women wear hijabs to hide their hair. As she would recount later, the girls at her school would remove their veils at recess, tying them together to make a skipping rope. “Having to wear something I don’t want to wear, just not being able to express exactly what I want to do,” she told NPR in 2007, “I just couldn’t handle it.” When she was fourteen, having slapped a principal who tried to take away her jewelry, she was sent to Vienna to live with an Iranian family. Unable to speak German, Satrapi struggled with culture shock and, after a turbulent four-year stretch during which she endured homelessness and illness, she returned to Tehran. There, she studied art and briefly married. In 1994, following her divorce, she moved to Strasbourg, France, where she obtained a second degree in art before moving to Paris.
In Paris, Satrapi embarked on her Persepolis series, black-and-white comics warmed alternately by humor, sensitivity, and rage, illustrating her experiences as a girl and then as a young adult in both Iran and Austria, tracing not only her personal trajectory but the path of Iranian politics and its effect on its citizens, particularly women. Published in France between 2000 and 2003, the books were translated to English beginning in 2003 and subsequently into more than twenty languages. While reaching a tremendous audience, Persepolis was perhaps most cherished by women like Satrapi herself.
“For my cohort (girls who began their adolescence in 1980s Iran and ended it in the west) Marjane Satrapi was a spokesperson for our trauma, our upbringing and our particular flavour of shame, repression and outspokenness,” wrote Iranian novelist Dina Nayeri in The Guardian on learning of Satrapi’s death. “She made us legible to our western peers.”
In 2007, with her creative partner Vincent Paronnaud, Satrapi cowrote and codirected the animated film Persepolis. The movie won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 2008 Academy Awards, making Satrapi the first woman in history to be nominated for that particular honor. The pair collaborated again on the 2011 film Chicken with Plums, which was based on her 2004 graphic novel of the same name and recounted the last days of her great-uncle. Other endeavors included the 2003 graphic novel Embroideries, about the love lives of Iranian women, and the feature films The Voices (2014) and Radioactive (2019), a biopic of Marie Curie, both of which she directed. Concurrent with her writing, cartooning, and painting efforts, Satrapi pursued a career as a painter. She was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2024; the following year she declined the Legion of Honor, France’s highest order of merit.
“I can’t ignore what I see as a hypocritical attitude towards Iran,” wrote Satrapi, in an Instagram post addressed to French culture minister Rachida Dati at the time, adding that she intended no disrespect to the award. “I can’t continue seeing the children of Iranian oligarchs come to spend their holidays in France, even become naturalized, while at the same time young dissidents have difficulty in obtaining a tourist visa to come to see what the country of the Enlightenment and human rights looks like.”
Satrapi published her last book in 2024. Titled Woman, Life, Freedom, the graphic novel anthologizes the work of artists and academics, as well as her own, in response to the 2022 killing of Mahsa Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who was beaten to death by police after being arrested for not wearing a hijab. Satrapi remained a staunch and vocal opponent of her native country’s Islamic regime and a supporter of women’s rights all her life. Her overarching goal, however, was to humanize Iranians. Speaking with The Guardian in 2024, she noted that Western film festivals were drawn to Iranian cinema showing the country “stuck in the dark ages,” with shots of “a hillside and a donkey” evoking a simple life. “Fuck that,” she told the publication. “We live in cities, we have very complicated problems.” Persepolis, she said, was ultimately about making audiences realize, “Oh, they’re actually human beings like us.”