Cartoonist Marjane Satrapi, best known for her Oscar-nominated “Persepolis,” has died at the age of 56.

PARIS, France — Marjane Satrapi, the renowned Iranian-French cartoonist and film-maker, renowned women’s rights advocate and author of “Persepolis,” has died at the age of 56, the French president said Thursday.

“Her death marks the passing of a leader of French culture and an artist committed to freedom, whose work conveyed a universal message and won her great international acclaim,” the French president said in a statement.

President Emmanuel Macron and his wife “pay tribute to a remarkable artist who transformed childhood in Iran into a universal allegory,” the statement said.

News broadcaster BFM TV and other French media reported that Satrapi “died of grief” more than a year after the death of her husband, Swedish film producer and actor Matthias Ripa, according to a statement from a person close to Satrapi.

The Ecole des Beaux-Arts, to which she belonged, expressed deep sadness in a social media statement and paid tribute to a “passionate advocate of film and film education” who earlier this year created a foundation to help international students come to Paris to study film.

Satrapi is best known for her monochrome autobiographical comic book and film “Persepolis,” a coming-of-age story set during the Islamic Revolution in her native Iran.

“Persepolis” won the Critics’ Award at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, the 2008 César Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and was nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film.

Satrapi told The Associated Press in a 2007 interview in Cannes that the film, which details her life in Tehran as the wayward daughter of intellectual Marxists, was a reminder that Iranians are just like everyone else.

“What we’re saying is, if these people scare you, look closer: they have parents, they have lovers, they have hopes, they have stories,” she said.

Iranian authorities sent a letter to the French Embassy in Tehran at the time protesting the film’s entry into the Cannes Film Festival.

Satrapi was born in Rasht, Iran, on November 22, 1969, but her parents sent her to Vienna in 1983 to complete her education due to the emergence of extremism in Iran following the 1979 revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power.

But Satrapi found Austria hostile and missed her parents so much that she returned to Iran in 1989 to attend the University of Tehran, where she earned a degree in visual communication.

By the time she graduated, Satrapi decided she was finally ready to leave Iran and accept the opportunities her parents had desperately wanted to provide her a decade earlier. In 1994, she moved to France. She studied in Strasbourg and later moved to Paris.

Her graphic novels also include Broderies (Embroidery) and Poulet aux prune (Chicken with Plums), which were also adapted into films. As a filmmaker, she directed several productions, including “La Bande des Jotas” and “Radioactivity,” a biography of Polish physicist Marie Curie.

In 2023, Satrapi collaborated with a group of artists and scholars to publish “Femme, vie, liberté” (“Woman, Life, Freedom”), a book about the rebellion in Iran that followed the 2022 murder of Mahesa Amini by the so-called “moral police.” The work denounces the repression and lack of human rights suffered by Iranian society, especially women, at the hands of the Iranian regime, the foundation said.

Satrapi was elected as a member of the French Academy of Fine Arts in 2024. That same year, she was also awarded France’s highest award, the Legion of Honor, but she declined it, believing that France was not doing enough to support the Iranian people’s struggle for democracy.

“Support for the Iranian women’s revolution cannot be limited to photos or speeches,” she wrote in a January 2025 letter to French authorities. “We should support people as they fight for democracy.”

In 2024, Satrapi received the Communication and Humanities Award from the Princess of Asturias Foundation in Spain. The organization called her an “important voice in defense of human rights and freedoms.” The judges described her as “a symbol of female-led civic engagement”.

Satrapi’s husband passed away in April 2025 at the age of 53. Instagram page, A single message in the series of posts read: “Because I lost the love of my life.”

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