Marjane Satrapi, the French-Iranian graphic novelist, artist, and film director whose landmark animated feature Persepolis earned a Cannes Jury Prize and an Oscar nomination and made her one of the most distinctive voices in world cinema, has died. She was 56.
“Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life,” members of her family said in a statement sent to AFP. Ripa, a Swedish producer, actor, and screenwriter, died on April 8, 2025. A series of posts on Satrapi’s Instagram page in the weeks before her death spelled out the message: “For I Lost the love of my life.”
Satrapi is best-known in the film world for Persepolis, the animated adaptation of her autobiographical graphic novel. The film version, which she co-wrote and co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud, debuted at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, where it shared the Jury Prize with Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light. Featuring the voices of Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, and Danielle Darrieux in the French version — and Gena Rowlands, Sean Penn, and Iggy Pop in the English — the film was a commercial and critical success, drawing more than a million admissions in France alone and winning Best First Film at the César Awards. It was also Oscar-nominated for best animated feature, making Satrapi the first woman ever nominated in that category.
