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Satrapi dies at 56
Marjane Satrapi, the French-Iranian author and illustrator best known for “Persepolis,” has died at 56, with the French presidency saying her work “captivated a global audience.”
The BBC reported that Persepolis was first published in 2000 and that the film adaptation was nominated for best animated feature at the Oscars, co-directed by Satrapi.
France President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to her as “a great artist who transformed an Iranian childhood into a universal fable,” while the palace added that “With her childlike perspective, her irony, her tenderness, and her inner demons, the author created a deeply moving world with which readers identified.”
France 24 said Satrapi “died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life,” and NBC News similarly said her family told AFP she “died of sadness.”
Tributes and activism
Satrapi’s death drew tributes from French politics and culture, including Yaël Braun-Pivet, president of the French National Assembly, who wrote on X that France had lost “an immense artist.”
In the same BBC account, Braun-Pivet said Satrapi “had turned her work into an act of freedom,” and that “With Persepolis, she had given a face and a voice to the Iranian revolution, proudly carrying the fight for women’s freedom and dignity.”
NPR highlighted that Satrapi told NPR in 2024, “A comic has this advantage,” adding, “Because the first language of the human being is drawing.”
NPR also quoted Satrapi in 2007 saying, “The real issue for me is human rights, it's the freedom of expression,” and “It's the freedom of thinking, you know.”
Legacy and ongoing work
Satrapi’s public life included both film and publishing, with the BBC noting that the film version of Persepolis stars Chiara Mastroianni as the voice of young Marjane and Catherine Deneuve as her mother.
“Oscar-nominated Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi dies aged 56 She "captivated a global audience with Persepolis", the palace said, calling her "a leading figure in French culture and an artist devoted to freedom, whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international renown"”
France 24 said she was a vocal supporter of protests after the 2022 death of 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini while in custody, and it quoted Satrapi saying, “It's very important that this regime disappears,” while also stressing, “I think it's important to remain hopeful.”
The BBC reported that Satrapi created Woman, Life, Freedom in 2022 and that in 2023 she led a protest outside the Iranian embassy in Paris in solidarity with five Tehran teenagers arrested for posting a TikTok video dancing to the Rema and Selena Gomez song Calm Down.
NPR said her last book, Woman, Life, Freedom (2024), was a collaborative anthology assembled in just five months, and it described her as continuing to draw, write, act, direct and advocate throughout her adult life.
