The French-Iranian artist, writer and film director Marjane Satrapi, who has died unexpectedly aged 56, spent much of her life in exile highlighting the struggles of ordinary Iranians – particularly women and girls – under the repressive Islamic regime.
She did this famously through her semi-autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis, published in four volumes in France between 2000 and 2003, and later adapted for film, which told the story of Marji, a girl whose childhood is marked by the overthrow of the shah, the rise of the ayatollahs and the Iran-Iraq war, mirroring Satrapi’s own experience.
Translated into many languages, it sold 4m copies and brought her fame and a second career as a film-maker living in Paris. However, Satrapi could not forget those still living in Iran.
The death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 at the hands of Tehran’s morality police, and the subsequent outrage and uprising under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” was, for Satrapi, a personal call to action.
In 2023 she collated her first graphic novel in nearly 20 years, a collection of drawings by a variety of artists and contributors about the protests in Iran, titled with that slogan.
The 2007 film adaptation of Persepolis, co-directed by Satrapi with Vincent Paronnaud, and featuring the voices of Iggy Pop, Catherine Deneuve, Gena Rowlands and Chiara Mastroianni, won the jury prize at the Cannes film festival that year and two Césars, the French equivalent of an Oscar, for best first film and best adaptation. The film, which maintains the bold, black-and-white imagery of the book, was also nominated for an Oscar, but branded by the Iranian regime as Islamophobic, a claim Satrapi, who said she had received death threats, dismissed.
“The true enemy of democracy is not a single person, or a regime,” she later said, in 2022. “The true enemy of democracy is the patriarchal culture. It is that culture that must be fought.”
Satrapi was born Marjan Ebrahimi in Rasht on the Caspian Sea and grew up in the capital, Tehran. In Persepolis, the parents of the character Marji, assumed to represent Satrapi, are Ebrahim, “Ebi”, an engineer, and his wife, Tadji. It is not clear if these were pseudonyms to protect Satrapi’s parents from reprisals in Iran, where the book was banned and where they stayed; Iranian sources state that Satrapi was the maiden name of her mother, a dress designer said to be descended from the 19th-century Persian king Nasser-al-Din Shah.
Her parents were upper-class, Marxist intellectuals who protested against the shah and later the Islamic regime. They encouraged their only child to be independent, but as a teenager Satrapi was rebellious; buying punk tapes on the black market and asking precocious questions at the school she attended, where female pupils were forced to wear headscarves, as she portrayed in Persepolis.
Fearing their daughter was heading for trouble with the Revolutionary Guard, and following the arrest, torture and execution of relatives, including an uncle, Anouche, Satrapi’s parents sent her aged 14 to study in Vienna. There she discovered drink, drugs and boys. Desperately homesick, she returned to Tehran four years later but became depressed, as she told the Guardian in a 2008 interview.
After gaining a degree in graphic arts and then a brief marriage at 21 to a fellow art student, Satrapi divorced and returned to Europe to study art in Strasbourg, supporting herself by teaching. Three years later, she moved to Paris, where she met Pierre-François Beauchard, known as David B, a comic book artist and co-founder of the graphic novel publishers L’Association. He persuaded her to tell her story through drawing. Inspired by Art Spiegelman’s classic Holocaust graphic novel, Maus, in 1999 Satrapi began writing Persepolis.
In the genre-defying memoir, which takes its title from the name of the ancient capital of the Persian empire, she used graphic black-and-white drawings and snappy dialogue to convey a mix of sadness, anger, humour and doubt.
“With Persepolis, she changed the image the French had of Iran,” said the French-Iranian critic Farid Vahid, co-author of her last book. “She made something complex accessible and she was able to do so because she had a deep understanding of both societies and both languages – France and Iranian. That was her genius.”
It was published in France the following year and she expected it to be bought by a few hundred people who felt sorry for “this poor Iranian girl living in Paris”. Instead, it was an instant phenomenon.
Satrapi’s follow-up comic book, Broderies (Embroideries, 2003), features the reflections of a group of Iranian women, on relationships, sex, their bodies and love in a chauvinistic society. Another of her graphic novels, Poulet aux Prunes (Chicken with Plums, 2004), about an uncle who loses the will to live after his wife breaks his tar, a lute-like instrument, won the best album prize at the Angouléme festival.
She adapted Poulet aux Prunes, again with Paronnaud, into a live-action film, which marked a departure for Satrapi. La Bande des Jotas (Gang of the Jotas, 2013), directed by and starring Satrapi, was about a woman on the run; then came The Voices (2014), an English-language black comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and Anna Kendrick, and Radioactive, a 2019 biopic of Marie Curie with Rosamund Pike. Her final film was Paradis Paris (Dear Paris, 2024), starring Monica Bellucci. She returned to the graphic novel with Woman, Life, Freedom.
“You cannot imagine how much they need to know they have support,” said Satrapi. “The slightest gesture gives them hope, even if it’s symbolic”.
She became a French citizen in 2006. Last year, Satrapi refused the Légion d’honneur, condemning France’s “hypocritical attitude towards Iran”, in particular in regard to the issuing of visas.
In 1995, she met the Swedish producer Mattias Ripa and they married in Stockholm the following year. He died in 2025. In February, the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris announced it was creating the Mattias and Marjane Ripa-Satrapi Film Foundation, to support the studies of two foreign students in Paris.
• Marjane Ripa-Satrapi, artist, author and film-maker, born 22 November 1969; died 4 June 2026
