The French-Iranian director and author Marjane Satrapi has died at the age of 56

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

“Her death marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and an artist committed to freedom, whose work carried a universal message and brought her immense international recognition,” 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 channel BFM TV and other French media reported that Satrapi “died of grief” just over a year after the death 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 deep sadness and paid tribute to “a passionate advocate of cinema and film education” who set up a foundation earlier this year to help international students come to Paris to study film.

In protest he refused the French honor

Satrapi is perhaps best known for her monochrome autobiographical comic book and film Persepolisa coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Islamic Revolution in her home country of Iran.

Persepolis won the Film Critics’ Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival in 2007 and the Cesar Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2008 and was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Animated Film in 2008.

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

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

The Iranian authorities at the time protested against the film’s inclusion in Cannes and sent a letter to the French embassy in Tehran.

Her graphic novels also include embroidery And Chicken with pruneswhich was also adapted into a film she directed and starring French actor Mathieu Amalric. She directed Radioactivea biopic about the Polish physicist Marie Curie, portrayed by Rosamund Pike, and The voicesa dark comedy/thriller with a cast that included Ryan Reynolds, Anna Kendrick and Gemma Atherton.

Satrapi coordinated the book in 2023 Woman, life, freedom along with a group of artists and scientists to illustrate the uprisings that took place in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 at the hands of the so-called moral police. The work denounces the oppression and lack of human rights suffered by Iranian society, especially women, at the hands of the Iranian regime, the foundation said.

In 2024, Satrapi was awarded France’s highest honor, the Legion of Honor, the same year, but rejected it on the grounds that France was not doing enough to support the Iranian people in the fight for democracy.

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

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

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

When she graduated, Satrapi decided she was finally ready to leave Iran and embrace the opportunities her parents had so desperately offered her a decade ago. In 1994 she moved to France. She studied in Strasbourg and later moved to Paris.