France 24 News and other outlets report Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi has died, aged 56. A statement provided to the Agence France-Presse by her family says she “died of sadness” following the death of her husband, film producer Mattias Ripa, who passed away on April 8, 2025, aged 53. A French Iranian cartoonist and filmmaker, Satrapi gained worldwide acclaim for her graphic memoir Persepolis (published from 2000 to 2003), and for directing its animated 2007 film adaptation with Vincent Paronnaud.
Marjane Satrapi’s Académie des Beaux-Arts portrait. Photo by Rahi Rezvani
Satrapi was born in Iran on November 22, 1969, and attended a French school in Tehran. She was nine when the country became a conservative theocracy ruled by Ruhollah Khomeini during the Iranian Revolution, and her uncle Anoosh was among those who were executed for opposing the government. Her parents, fearing for her safety, arranged for her to study abroad in Vienna.
She eventually returned to Iran to study visual communication at the Islamic Azad University in Tehran, and became briefly married to her fellow student Reza: the marriage ended in divorce. She moved to France in 1994 to study at the art and music school Haute école des arts du Rhin (HEAR) in Strasbourg. At her parents’ urging, she decided to stay in the country permanently, and eventually gained French citizenship in 2006.
Subsequent comics after the release of Persepolis included Chicken with Plums, the story of the circumstances surrounding her great uncle Nasser Ali Khan‘s death in 1958. Satrapi reteamed with Paronnaud on the live-action, 2011 film adaptation starring Mathieu Amalric. By this point, she had grown tired of making comics, and switched to filmmaking entirely. However, she would return to the medium in 2024 to oversee the anthology Woman, Life, Freedom, inspired by the Iranian feminist protest movement of the same name.
Her subsequent film credits included 2012’s crime caper Gang of the Jotas (which she also starred in), 2014’s black comedy The Voices (starring Ryan Reynolds), 2019’s Marie Curie biopic Radioactive (based on the graphic novel by Lauren Redniss), and her final work, 2024’s black comedy Dear Paris. She was recognized with multiple awards during her life, including the Cesar (France’s equivalent of the Oscars) for Best First Feature Film for Persepolis in 2008, and an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature that year.
Further awards would’ve included the French Légion d’Honneur in 2025, but she refused the honor, citing visa policies that prevented members of the Iranian opposition from leaving the country for France. After Ripa’s death, she founded the Mattias and Marjane Ripa-Satrapi Cinema Foundation, which supports foreign students interested in studying filmmaking at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which she served on the faculty of. The academy responded to the news, describing Satrapi as an “admirable, luminous woman of absolute integrity.”
