Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian artist, animator and director based in France, best known for the 2007 Academy Award-nominated animated biographical film Persepolis, has died. She was 56 years old.
“Marjane Satrapi passed away from grief, more than a year after the death of her husband and the love of her life, Mathias Ripa,” a statement “from close friends and family” sent to France’s AFP news agency on June 3 announced her death. Ripa, who was a producer, actor, and screenwriter, passed away on April 8, 2025.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s office announced Satrapi’s death in a statement on Thursday. “Her death marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture, a freedom-loving artist whose work conveyed a universal message and received tremendous international acclaim,” the statement said.
Satrapi, who grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Tehran, was 10 years old when Khomeini came to power in 1979. An outspoken critic of the Iranian government, she moved to France in 1994 and became a French citizen in 2006. In 2007, she and co-director Vincent Paronnaud made an animated film based on the story, Persepolis. Satrapi’s autobiographical best-selling graphic novel depicts her experiences growing up in Iran during the 1979 revolution, and is a scathing, satirical depiction of repressive life under the mullahs’ rule. Persepolis won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 2008 Academy Awards.
“I come from a country where women are worth half as much as men,” she told Variety magazine in 2007, adding, “I never thought I had less legs just because I was a woman.”
Satrapi and Paronnaud went on to make their second animated feature, Chicken with Plums, about a musician who loses the will to live after his wife destroys his instrument during an argument, which premiered in competition in Venice in 2011.
Satrapi’s subsequent films include the 2012 crime comedy La Bande des Jotas, in which two friends who travel to Spain for a badminton tournament get caught up in an airport baggage mix-up. Satrapi also appeared in the film opposite Ripa.
In 2019, Satrapi directed Radioactive, a biopic about pioneering scientist Marie Curie, set in late 19th century Paris, starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie.
Asked by Variety at the time if Hollywood was sexist, she said, “If you go over a certain budget, women directors aren’t trusted. You can make smaller movies, but you can make bigger movies. It’s, ‘Oh, she doesn’t know how to deal with that.'” Of course it is possible. It’s a 5000 year culture. You can’t change it in 5 years. It will take time. ”
Satrapi’s last film was 2024’s “Dear Paris” (“Paris Paradis”), a dark comedy set in the French capital that follows a series of fascinating characters as they confront death and embrace life again.
Last year, she refused to accept France’s highest national honor, the Legion d’Honneur, citing France’s “hypocrisy” in its diplomatic dealings with Iran.
“I cannot ignore what I see as a hypocritical attitude toward Iran, which has fabricated other parts of my identity,” Satrapi said in an open letter to France’s culture minister posted on social media.
“We cannot continue to see the children of Iranian oligarchs vacationing in France and even becoming naturalized, while young dissidents have difficulty obtaining tourist visas to come and see what a country of enlightenment and human rights is like,” she continued.
