Marjane Satrapi, French-Iranian graphic novelist, artist and filmmaker, creator of the distinguished animation film Persepolis Winning her the Jury Prize at Cannes and being nominated for an Academy Award and establishing her as one of the most distinguished voices in world cinema, she has died. She was 56 years old.
Members of her family said in a statement sent to Agence France-Presse: “Marjane Satrapi passed away in grief, just over a year after the death of Matthias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life.” Ripa, a Swedish producer, actress, and screenwriter, died on April 8, 2025. A series of posts on Satrapi’s Instagram page in the weeks before her death included the following message: “Because I lost the love of my life.”
Satrapi is famous in the world of cinema for Persepolisthe animated adaptation of her autobiographical graphic novel. The film version, which she co-wrote and directed with Vincent Paronnaud, debuted at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, where it shared the Jury Prize with Carlos Reygadas’s film. Silent light. Featuring the voices of Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, and Danielle Darrieux in the French version – and Gena Rowlands, Sean Penn, and Iggy Pop in the English version – the film was a commercial and critical success, attracting over one million admissions in France alone and winning Best First Feature at the César Awards. It was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, making Satrapi the first woman ever nominated in the category.
Satrapi and Baronnaud re-teamed Chicken with plums (2011), a live-action adaptation of her graphic novel of the same name. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival. She has directed several films herself, including crime comedies La bande de jotas (2012), a comedy horror film Votes (2014), starring Ryan Reynolds, Anna Kendrick, and Gemma Arterton, a biopic of Marie Curie. Radioactive (2019), starring Rosamund Pike. Her latest films, Dear Paris Paradis Paris, starring Monica Bellucci, will premiere at the 2024 Turin Film Festival.
PersepolisThe film and graphic novel trace Satrapi’s childhood in post-revolutionary Iran as the daughter of upper-middle-class leftist activists who opposed the last Shah’s regime and were persecuted in the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Satrapi was nine years old at the time and PersepolisShe takes on her child’s perspective as the country she knew disappears before her eyes. Family members and friends were persecuted, arrested and killed. Her uncle Anoush, a political prisoner whom she adored, was executed and buried in an unmarked grave in Evin Prison.
As a teenager, Satrapi ran afoul of the regime’s morality police, circumventing modesty rules and smuggling banned music. Fearing for her safety, her parents arranged for her to leave Iran at the age of fourteen to study at the French School in Vienna, Austria. Her years abroad were turbulent: she moved repeatedly, eventually lost her housing, and spent three months living on the streets of Vienna before a fatal bout of bronchitis brought her back to Iran, where she completed a master’s degree in visual communication at Islamic Azad University, and married Reza, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War. They eventually divorced, and Satrapi returned to Europe, settling permanently in France in the early 1990s. She became a French citizen in 2006.
The Iranian government denounced Persepolis He successfully lobbied for the film’s removal from the Bangkok International Film Festival.
It was in France that Satrapi found her artistic voice. Beginning in 2000, she published Persepolis In four volumes through Paris-based publisher L’Association, she chronicles her Iranian childhood and European adolescence in bold black-and-white paintings. The work was translated into English in two volumes in 2003 and 2004, and became a global phenomenon, being translated into more than 25 languages and selling more than a million copies worldwide. Her subsequent graphic novel Chicken with plums It won the Angoulême Prize for Best Comic Book in 2005. Satrapi has always insisted on calling the genre “comics” rather than “graphic novels” – “people are too afraid to say the word ‘comics’,” she told The Guardian in 2011. “Replace it with ‘graphic novel’ and this will go away. No: they’re all comics.”
Satrapi’s art can never be separated from her politics. In the wake of Iran’s disputed 2009 presidential election, Satrapi appeared before members of the European Parliament alongside director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to present evidence she said showed reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi actually won. When the Mahsa Amini protests broke out in 2022, she was among the most vocal voices in the international arts community in support of the women-led uprising, directing and curating an illustrated anthology – published in English as Women, life, freedom – To document the movement for Western readers. “The real revolution is cultural,” she said at the time.
In January 2025, she rejected France’s highest official honour, the Legion of Honour, citing what it described as French hypocrisy in its dealings with Iran, particularly the country’s visa policies towards Iranian dissidents. “This is in no way an action or idea against France,” she explained. “On the contrary, I love this country very much, and it is my country.”
Fluent in Persian, French, English, Swedish, German and Italian, Satrapi was a unique figure in the culture of two continents – an Iranian exile and a French artist, a cartoonist who made history at the Oscars, and a political activist who turned grief, anger and memory into timeless art.
