Iranian French artist, animator and Oscar-nominated director Marjane Satrapi, best known internationally for her 2007 biographical animated feature Persepolis and Rosamund Pike-starring film Radioactive, 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,” a statement from close friends and family announcing her death on June 3 and sent to the AFP newswire read. Satrapi’s husband the producer, actor, and screenwriter Ripa died on April 8, 2025.
Iran-born artist and director Satrapi had lived in France since the early 1990s after her parents sent her to Europe to study as a teenager to escape the restrictions of living under the Islamic Republic regime and encouraged her to make her permanent home there.
Born on 22 November 1969 in Rasht in northwestern Iran, Satrapi had an upper middle class upbringing in Tehran, where she attended the French lycée as a child. Her parents were politically active and supported leftist activism against the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and then the restrictions of the Islamic Republic.
Satrapi, who was nine-years old when Pahlavi was toppled and Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979, recounted her experiences growing up under the latter’s draconian government in the graphic novel Persepolis.
She turned the work into an animated feature in 2007, co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud, which went on to win the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 2008 Academy Awards as well as for the prestigious animation-focused Annie Awards.
Satrapi and Paronnaud went on to collaborate on a second animated feature, Chicken with Plums which premiered in competition in Venice in 2011. Adapted from another of her graphic novels, this time inspired by a relative back in Iran, it revolved around about a musician whose life is sent into a tailspin after his wife destroys his beloved violin.
She broke into live action directing with her 2012 crime-comedy Gang of the Jotas (La Bande des Jotas). Revolving around an airport baggage mix-up, Satrapi also starred in the film opposite Ripa.
Satrapi was then courted by Hollywood and went on to direct Ryan Reynolds and Gemma Arterton in the 2014 comedy The Voices. She followed this with the Working Title-produced 2019 bio-pic Radioactive, starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie.
Her last film was ensemble dark comedy Dear Paris in which several of the city’s long-term residents are interconnected by different brushes with death. Monica Bellucci, Roschdy Zem, Alex Lutz and André Dussollier featured in the cast.
Activism
In the backdrop, Satrapi was a life-long activist against Iran’s Islamic Regime and the restrictions it placed on the lives of women and wider society.
In an interview with Deadline in 2023, in the wake of the Woman Life Freedom protests, she recalled how her parents had taken to the streets to protest the regime’s imposition of the hijab for women in 1983.
“He was one of the very few men; they didn’t understand at the time that women’s rights are society’s rights,” she said of her father.
Satrapi revealed she had received threats and slurs from the regime in relation to Persepolis and her other activism.
“I’ve been called a liar and a spy. I’ve learned in life not to be scared,” she says. “It’s not that you don’t feel fear; you feel the fear, but then you decide whether you care about it or not. It’s not that I’m fearless or careless but there are kids in my country who are being shot and they are 17 years old, while I have lived for more than half a century.”
In the wake of the Woman Life Freedom protests, she organized a flash mob in front of the Iranian embassy in Paris in 2023 in solidarity with five Tehran teenagers who were arrested for posting a TikTok dancing to the Rema and Selena Gomez track “Calm Down”.
“We artists must be humble but doing nothing is worse, being indifferent is worse. I don’t think what I’m doing is huge or immense but I have a voice, I have a face and I’m known in France, I’m just doing what I have to do,” she told Deadline.
