Marjane Satrapi, ‘Persepolis’ author, dies ‘of sadness’ at 56

Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-French author and filmmaker whose graphic memoir “Persepolis” brought the human cost of Iran’s Islamic Revolution to millions of readers around the world, died Wednesday. She was 56.

A statement from close friends and family sent to France’s AFP newswire said Ms. Satrapi “died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life.” Ripa, a producer, actor and screenwriter, died on April 8, 2025.

The office of French President Emmanuel Macron announced her death Thursday.

“Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and a freedom-loving artist whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim,” the statement said. 

Ms. Satrapi was born Nov. 22, 1969, in Rasht, near the Caspian Sea, and grew up in Tehran in a politically active, cosmopolitan family. Her parents opposed the shah and protested his government, but were disillusioned by the cultural and political crackdown that followed the 1979 revolution. An uncle was accused of being a Soviet spy, jailed and executed.

After she struck a school principal who tried to confiscate her jewelry, her parents sent her to Austria to study. She later described a difficult few years in Vienna, at one point homeless before returning to Tehran in 1989. After returning to Iran, she obtained a degree in graphic arts from the School of Fine Arts at Tehran Islamic Azad University. Following a brief marriage that ended in divorce, she left Iran for France in 1994, taking additional coursework at the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg before settling permanently in Paris. 

Those years — from a childhood shadowed by revolution and war to her turbulent adolescence abroad — became the raw material for “Persepolis,” her autobiographical graphic novel series published in France between 2000 and 2003. The books drew on the tradition of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” to blend political history with personal memoir, rendered in stark black-and-white drawings that one Times reviewer said evoked both contemporary comics and Persian miniatures. The first English-language volume appeared in 2003.

Ms. Satrapi co-directed a 2007 animated film adaptation of “Persepolis” with Vincent Paronnaud. The film won the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for best animated feature at the 2008 Academy Awards. She and Mr. Paronnaud followed it with “Chicken with Plums,” adapted from her graphic novel about a musician who loses the will to live, which premiered in competition at Venice in 2011. 

Ms. Satrapi later moved into live-action directing, helming the 2014 dark comedy “The Voices” with Ryan Reynolds and the 2019 biographical film “Radioactive,” in which Rosamund Pike portrayed Marie Curie. Her final film was the 2024 dark comedy “Dear Paris,” set in the French capital, in which a series of characters confront death only to embrace life once again.

She remained a fierce critic of Iran’s government throughout her life. In 2023, she organized a flash mob in front of the Iranian Embassy in Paris in solidarity with five Tehran teenagers arrested for posting a TikTok video of themselves dancing. That same year, she told Deadline she had received threats from the regime over “Persepolis” but would not be deterred. “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,” she said. 

Her final major written work, the 2024 graphic anthology “Woman, Life, Freedom,” addressed the unrest that followed the 2022 death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman detained for allegedly violating Iran’s mandatory hijab law. Ms. Satrapi described her role on the project as more director than author, gathering contributions from artists, activists, academics and journalists.

On Feb. 28, 2024, Ms. Satrapi was elected to seat V of the cinema and audiovisual section of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, previously held by the late director and producer Jacques Perrin. The election was formally approved by presidential decree on June 20, 2024. 

A list of survivors was not immediately available. 

Despite creating some of the best-known works in the graphic novel form, Ms. Satrapi was ambivalent about the label itself.

“I think they made up this term for the bourgeoisie not to be scared of comics,” she said in 2007. And though she spent most of her adult life in Paris, she never relinquished her sense of where home was. “No matter how long I live in France,” she wrote in a 2009 essay, “to me the word ’home’ has only one meaning: Iran.”