French-Iranian director and author Marjane Satrapi dead at 56

Acclaimed Iranian-French cartoonist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi, a prominent advocate for women’s rights, has died at 56, the French presidency said Thursday.

“Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure of French culture and an artist devoted to freedom, whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim,” the presidency said in a statement.

President Emmanuel Macron and his wife “pay tribute to a remarkable artist who transformed an Iranian childhood into a universal fable,” it said.

News broadcaster BFM TV and other French media reported Satrapi has “died of sadness” just over a year after the death at of her husband, Swedish film producer and actor Mattias Ripa, according to a statement from people close to the artist.

In a social media statement, the French Academy of Fine Arts, of which she was a member, expressed its deep sadness, paying tribute to “a passionate advocate for cinema and film education” who earlier this year created a foundation to help international students come to Paris to study film.

Turned down French honour in protest

Satrapi is perhaps best known for her monochrome autobiographical comic book and film Persepolis, a coming-of-age tale set against the Islamic Revolution in her native Iran.

Persepolis won the Film Critics Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival in 2007 and the Cesar Award for best adapted screenplay in 2008, in addition to being nominated for best animated feature at the 2008 Oscars.

The film, which details her life in Tehran as the wilful daughter of intellectual Marxists, is a reminder that Iranians are just like everyone else, Satrapi told The Associated Press in a 2007 interview in Cannes.

“What we wanted to say is, if these people scare you, look closer: They have parents, they have lovers, they have hope, they have stories.”

Iranian authorities at the time protested the movie’s inclusion at Cannes, sending a letter to the French Embassy in Tehran.

Her graphic novels also include Broderies and Poulet aux prunes, which also was adapted into a film she directed starring French actor Mathieu Amalric. She directed Radioactive, a biopic about Polish physicist Marie Curie, portrayed by Rosamund Pike, and The Voices, a black comedy/thriller with a cast that included Ryan Reynolds, Anna Kendrick and Gemma Atherton.

Satrapi in 2023 co-ordinated the book Femme, vie, liberte together with a group of artists and academics to illustrate the revolts that occurred in Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 at the hands of the so-called morality police. The work denounces the repression and lack of human rights that Iranian society, especially women, suffers at the hands of the Iranian regime, the foundation said.

In 2024, Satrapi was offered France’s highest award, the Legion of Honor, that same year, but declined it, arguing France was not doing enough to support Iranian people fighting for democracy.

“Supporting the women’s revolution in Iran cannot be reduced to photos or speeches,” she wrote in a January 2025 letter to French officials. “When people are fighting for democracy, we should support them.”

Satrapi was born on Nov. 22, 1969, in Rasht, Iran, but her parents sent her to Vienna in 1983 to finish her studies because of the extremism in their country following the 1979 Revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power.

But Satrapi, who found Austria hostile and desperately missed her parents, returned to Iran in 1989 to attend Tehran University, where she earned a degree in visual communications.

By the time she graduated, Satrapi decided she finally was ready to leave Iran and accept the opportunities her parents had been so desperate to give her a decade before. In 1994 she moved to France. She studied in Strasbourg and later moved to Paris.