She had survived political repression, the loneliness of exile, and sectarian violence. She had become the voice of thousands of Iranian compatriots and, in reality, of citizens worldwide demanding fundamental rights from autocracies. She had managed to make graphic novels like Persepolis and Chicken with Plums - and their corresponding film adaptations - touch the hearts of anyone with sensitivity and achieve bestseller status without it seeming like an oxymoron. Probably at the peak of her artistic career, beloved by several generations of readers, cartoonist Marjane Satrapi passed away on Thursday at the age of 56, as reported by her family.
"She died of sadness more than a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life," reads the statement sent by her loved ones to the AFP agency. The producer, actor, and director Mattias Ripa had passed away on April 8, 2025. Satrapi had been awarded a year earlier with the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, which distinguished her for being "an essential voice for the defense of human rights and freedom." The Iranian used her comics and films to convey a universal message of democracy, equality, and freedom to the world.
Satrapi passed away just over a year after her husband and almost mirroring the voluntary disappearance, born of disillusionment, of Nasser Ali, the musician protagonist of Chicken with Plums.
In an interview with this newspaper, she contextualized the autobiographical saga Persepolis, which she drew in 2000 when she was still a student at the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg and became an essential playbook for storytellers in comic strips from the Middle East, like Riad Sattouf (The Arab of the Future) and Zeina Abirached (The Oriental Piano): "I am not aware, because for that, you have to meet people who tell you, but I am a solitary person, I have three or four friends. I only have a social life when I make movies. I hate going out. I think we must be humble with the artistic work we do. I need time to reflect, and that is something that is done alone."
The cartoonist, filmmaker, illustrator, painter, and writer was born in Rasht (Iran) in 1969. She was raised in a progressive-minded family in Tehran and educated at the French Lyceum in the capital until the Islamic authorities who took power after the 1979 revolution decided to end bilingual education.
Those are the years that she precisely portrays in the graphic novel that projected her career, those of childhood and adolescence in an Iran that awaited the ayatollahs' revolution and whose society ended up seeing its freedoms curtailed by those same revolutionaries. Marji, as she was called at home, arrived in France in 1994. She left behind her parents and grandmother. She first settled in Strasbourg and then in Paris. She never returned to her country.
Satrapi had decided in the late 1990s to dedicate herself professionally to illustration. In that initiatory stage, she published the children's storybook Adjar and The Monsters Are Afraid of the Moon. It was after meeting the cartoonist and writer Christophe Blain that she began collaborating with the collective L'Association and became aware, thanks to Blain, that her memories in her country could be narrative material. The first of the four volumes of Persepolis was published in France in 2000. Norma Editorial published its Spanish translation in 2002. In 2003, she was awarded the first Fernando Buesa Blanco Peace Prize.
The animated film adaptation of Persepolis in collaboration with Vincent Paronnaud earned her international acclaim and the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. She was also nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. In her field, that of black and white panels, she achieved the same impact in the West as compatriots like Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Bahman Ghobadi, and Asghar Farhadi.
"Although this film is universal, I want to dedicate it to all Iranians," declared the artist at the time. Living in exile in France since 1994 and obtaining French nationality in 2006, she never stopped looking at her native country with concern. She denounced the situation of women for decades. The death of Mahsa Amini on September 16, 2022, after the beating she received in the police station by the Moral Police for not wearing the veil properly, encouraged her to further her moral commitment.
Parallel to the wave of protests that shook all of Iran and turned into an unprecedented feminist movement in the Central Asian country, Satrapi published the non-fiction choral work Woman, Life, Freedom. In it, she brought together political scientist Farid Vahid, reporter Jean-Pierre Perrin, historian Abbas Milani, and twenty of the greatest talents in the world of comics, such as Joann Sfar, Paco Roca, and Lewis Trondheim.
In 2011, a decade before the so-called Veil Revolution, she saw the premiere on the big screen of another graphic novel, Chicken with Plums, winner of the Best Album Award at the 2005 Angoulême Festival. Satrapi participated as co-director, once again alongside Vincent Paronnaud, in the film adaptation, this time with flesh-and-blood actors. Chicken with Plums also captivated in black and white and with the recognizable graphic style of the Iranian, although unlike Persepolis, it was not inspired by her own life.
Its protagonist was the violinist Nasser Ali, one of the most famous musicians in mid-century Tehran, who falls into a deep depression when he loses his instrument and cannot find another worthy of replacing it. He then decides to take to his bed and let himself die after eight days of waiting. Dramatic circumstances in fiction that, painfully, have been transferred to the real world with the artist's passing.
Other works by Satrapi were Embroideries (2003) and The Sigh (2004). A staunch opponent of the authorities in Tehran, Satrapi rejected the French Legion of Honor in 2025 to denounce "France's hypocritical attitude towards Iran," where strong repression was occurring again.
"For some time now, I have really struggled to understand France's policy towards Iran," the artist indicated on Instagram, lamenting that "young Iranians who love freedom, dissidents, artists, are denied visas."
Emmanuel Macron, President of the French Republic, referred to Satrapi as "a great artist who transformed Iranian childhood into a universal fable". "With her childlike perspective, her irony, her tenderness, her inner demons, the author created a moving world with which readers identified," he emphasized from the Elysee Palace in statements collected by AFP.
The Princess of Asturias Foundation has joined in expressing condolences for Satrapi's passing. "She was an example of humanity, compassion, resilience against adversity, integrity, and strength. Her light will continue to shine for us continuously, through her exceptional work and her words. As the verses of the Iranian poet Saadi that she herself recited in her speech at the Campoamor theater, after receiving the award say: When life causes pain to one member / the others do not rest," the institution recalled.
The Franco-Iranian sociologist Azadeh Kian, a friend of Satrapi, stated on France Info that the death of her husband was a blow from which Satrapi never fully recovered. "She was not the same since his death", she explained.
According to Kian, the author of Persepolis repeatedly mentioned in their conversations that she had "stopped fighting" and wanted to "leave". "She was letting herself die since the loss of the love of her life," affirmed the academic, who recalled that they had grown up together and maintained a very close relationship. Despite her delicate health condition, Satrapi remained very attentive to her country until the very end, now at war with Israel and the United States.