R.I.P. Marjane Satrapi, author and director of Persepolis

The graphic novelist and film director was 56 years old.

By Drew Gillis  |  June 4, 2026 | 10:48am
Image: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Books News Marjane Satrapi
R.I.P. Marjane Satrapi, author and director of Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi, the graphic novelist and director who achieved global renown with Persepolis and its film adaptation, has died. According to The New York Times, her death was announced by French President Emmanuel Macron, who did not share a cause of death but acknowledged Satrapi as “a freedom-loving artist whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim.” Friends and family told Deadline that the author “died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life.” Satrapi was 56 years old. 

Known for bridging cultural gaps with her work, Satrapi published the autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis, originally published in four volumes in France between 2000 and 2003. She co-wrote the screenplay and co-directed the 2007 film adaptation of the novels with Vincent Paronnaud. Satrapi also wrote the graphic novel Chicken With Plums and directed its 2011 film adaptation. She directed the 2019 Marie Curie biopic Radioactive, which stars Rosamund Pike as the scientist, and the 2014 film The Voices, which stars Ryan Reynolds and Anna Kendrick. 

Born in Iran in 1969, Satrapi was about 10 years old when the Shah was overthrown and left the country to study in Austria when she was 14. In 1994, Satrapi moved to Paris, where her work as an author really began. In a later essay titled “Why I Wrote Persepolis,” Satrapi explained that she felt in France like she was constantly defending Iran to people who got an incomplete picture of the country from the news. She was prompted by friends to put the stories she had long been telling on paper, and Persepolis was born. 

“If I were to write a memoir with words, I’d have to figure out a way to express verbally an image I have in my mind. In my case, it’s easier to draw it,” Satrapi told Believer in a 2006 interview. “And words also are filters. They have to be translated. Even in the original language, there is interpretation and some ambiguity. If there’s a cultural difference between the writer and the reader, that might come out in words. But with pictures, there’s more efficiency.”

The film adaptation of Persepolis was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 80th Academy Awards, and earned nominations at the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs as well. Persepolis tied for the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival as well. In his contemporary review for The A.V. Club, critic Noel Murray wrote that the “feature-film version that loses some of the digressive, impressionistic structure that made the books so charming, but adds a sense of comic whimsy that a single drawing couldn’t exactly replicate,” observing that the film mainly argues “that strife is relative, and all politics are personal.” 

Satrapi worked fairly consistently throughout the rest of her life, publishing her now-final graphic novel Woman, Life, Freedom with historian Abbas Milani. When asked in 2020 whether she was concerned about her influence after her death, Satrapi told Le Monde, “Post-mortem? Are you kidding? I couldn’t care less! My death will be as absurd and insignificant as that of a microbe or an earthworm. It’s unbearable, but that’s the way it is. I just want to die satisfied.”

 
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