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France-based Iranian artist, animator and director Marjane Satrapi, best known for her Oscar-nominated 2007 biographical animated feature “Persepolis,” 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,” said a statement “from close friends and family” sent to France’s AFP newswire announcing her death on June 3. Ripa, a producer, actor and screenwriter, died on April 8, 2025.

The office of French president Emmanuel Macron announced Satrapi’s death on Thursday in a statement. “Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and a freedom-loving artist whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim,” the statement said.

Satrapi, who grew up in an an upper middle class family in Tehran, was a 10-year-old child when Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. An outspoken critic of Iran’s government, she arrived in France in 1994 and gained French nationality in 2006. In 2007, she and co-director Vincent Paronnaud made the animated film “Persepolis” — based on Satrapi’s autobiographical, bestselling graphic novel about her experiences growing up in Iran at the time of the 1979 revolution – that offers a wry, satirical take on the oppressive life under the rule of the mullahs. “Persepolis” won the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for best animated feature at the 2008 Academy Awards.

“I come from a country where a woman is worth half a man,” she told Variety in 2007, adding: “I never thought I had one leg less just because I was a woman.”

Satrapi and Paronnaud went on to make a second animated feature, “Chicken With Plums,” the story of a musician who loses the will to live after his wife breaks his instrument in an argument, which premiered in competition in Venice in 2011.

Satrapi’s subsequent films comprise 2012 crime-comedy “Gang of the Jotas” (“La Bande des Jotas”) about two friends who travel to Spain for a badminton tournament and get caught up in an airport luggage mix-up. Satrapi also starred in the film opposite Ripa.

In 2019 Satrapi directed “Radioactive” a biopic of pioneering scientist Marie Curie set in late 19th century Paris starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie.

Asked by Variety at the time about whether Hollywood was sexist she said: “Beyond a certain budget, they don’t trust women directors. We can make smaller films, but bigger films — it’s “Oh, she doesn’t know how to handle it.” Of course we can handle it. It’s 5,000 years of culture. We cannot change it in five years. It will take time.”

Satrapi’s last film was the 2024 “Dear Paris” (“Paris Paradis”) a dark comedy set in the French capital where a flurry of charming characters confront death only to embrace life once again. 

Last year she refused to accept France’s legion d’honneur, the country’s top state honor, citing France’s “hypocrisy” in its diplomatic dealings with Iran.

“I can’t ignore what I see as a hypocritical attitude toward Iran, which forged the other part of my identity,” Satrapi wrote in an open letter to France’s culture minister posted on social media.

“I can’t continue seeing the children of Iranian oligarchs come to spend their holidays in France, even become naturalised, while at the same time young dissidents have difficulty in obtaining a tourist visa to come to see what the country of the Enlightenment and human rights looks like,” she went on to note.