Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-French artist, filmmaker and author of the autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis, has died aged 56, French President Emmanuel Macron’s office said yesterday.
“Her passing is that of a figure of French culture and of an artist enamoured of freedom, whose work carried a universal message and had earned her immense international renown,” the Elysee said in a statement.
A statement released by members of her family said she had died of ‘sadness’ a little over a year after the death of her husband, Swedish actor, producer and screenwriter Mattias Ripa. No further information about the cause of her death was available.
Born in 1969, Satrapi spent her childhood in Tehran in a Communist-leaning household. Her parents sent her to Vienna as a teenager, before she returned to Iran to study fine arts and later settled in France, where she continued her training in Strasbourg.
She drew on that life of revolution, exile and return in Persepolis, the stark black-and-white memoir that chronicled her childhood during and after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. The book became an international success and was later adapted into an animated film, which won the jury prize at Cannes and was nominated for an Academy Award.
Satrapi’s work mixed political defiance with dark humour and a stripped-down visual style, making her one of the best-known graphic novelists of her generation.
She went on to direct films including Chicken with Plums, The Voices and Radioactive, about scientist Marie Sklodowska Curie.
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