Marjane Satrapi, the French-Iranian graphic novelist, artist and film director whose landmark animated feature Persepolis earned a Cannes Jury Prize and an Oscar nomination and made her one of the most distinctive voices in world cinema, has died. She was 56.
“Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life,” members of her family said in a statement sent to AFP.
Ripa, a Swedish producer, actor and screenwriter, died April 8, 2025. A series of posts on Satrapi’s Instagram page in the weeks before her death spelled out the message: “For I Lost the love of my life.”
Satrapi is best-known in the film world for Persepolis, the animated adaptation of her autobiographical graphic novel. The film version, which she co-wrote and co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud, debuted at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, where it shared the Jury Prize with Carlos Reygadas’s 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 — the film was a commercial and critical success, drawing more than a million admissions in France alone and winning best first film at the César Awards. It was also Oscar-nominated for best animated feature, making Satrapi the first woman nominated in that category.
Satrapi and Paronnaud re-teamed for Chicken With Plums (2011), a live-action adaptation of her graphic novel of the same name. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival. She directed several movies on her own, including crime comedy La bande des Jotas (2012), horror-comedy The Voices (2014), starring Ryan Reynolds, Anna Kendrick and Gemma Arterton, and the Marie Curie biopic Radioactive (2019), starring Rosamund Pike. Her most recent film, Dear Paris (Paradis Paris), starring Monica Bellucci, premiered at the Torino Film Festival in 2024.
Persepolis, the film and the graphic novel, trace Satrapi’s childhood in post-revolutionary Iran as the daughter of upper-middle-class leftist activists who opposed the monarchy of the last Shah and were persecuted following the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Satrapi was nine years old at the time and Persepolis, takes her child’s perspective as the country she knew disappears before her eyes. Family members and friends were persecuted, arrested, and killed. Her paternal uncle Anoosh, a political prisoner she adored, was executed and buried in an unmarked grave at Evin Prison.
By her teens, Satrapi was running afoul of the regime’s morality police, skirting rules on modesty and smuggling in banned music. Fearing for her safety, her parents arranged for her to leave Iran at 14 to study at the Lycée Français de Vienne in Austria. The years abroad were turbulent: she moved repeatedly, eventually lost her housing, and spent three months living on the streets of Vienna before a near-fatal bout of bronchitis sent 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 would eventually divorce and Satrapi moved back to Europe, settling permanently in France in the early 1990s. She became a French citizen in 2006.
The Iranian government denounced Persepolis and 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 the Paris-based publisher L’Association, chronicling her Iranian childhood and European adolescence in bold black-and-white panels. Translated into English in two volumes in 2003 and 2004, the work became an international phenomenon, translated into more than 25 languages, it sold over a million copies worldwide. Her subsequent graphic novel Chicken with Plums won the Angoulême Best Comic Book Award in 2005. Satrapi always insisted on calling the form “comics” rather than “graphic novels” — “People are so afraid to say the word ‘comic,’” she told The Guardian in 2011. “Change it to ‘graphic novel’ and that disappears. No: it’s all comics.”
Satrapi’s art could never be separated from her politics. Following the disputed Iranian presidential election of 2009, Satrapi appeared before European Parliament members alongside filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf to present evidence she said showed reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi had actually won. When the Mahsa Amini protests erupted in 2022, she was among the most outspoken voices in the international arts community in support of the women-led uprising, directing and coordinating a graphic anthology — published in English as Woman, Life, Freedom — to document the movement for Western readers. “A real revolution is cultural,” she said at the time.
In January 2025, she declined France’s highest official honor, the Légion d’honneur, citing what she called French hypocrisy in its dealings with Iran, particularly the country’s visa policies toward Iranian dissidents. “This is in no way an action or a thought against France,” she clarified. “On the contrary, I deeply love this country, which is my country.”
Fluent in Persian, French, English, Swedish, German, and Italian, Satrapi was a singular 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 and fury and memory into enduring art.