Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian French artist, animator and Oscar-nominated director best known for Persepolis, has died at 56. Close friends and family said she died of sadness a little over a year after the death of her husband, Mattias Ripa.

The name Mattias Ripa is drawing attention now because Satrapi’s death lands so close to his. He died on April 8, 2025, and she had described him as the love of her life. For readers who knew Satrapi through her work, the loss closes a private chapter that was largely hidden behind a public career defined by art, defiance and grief.

Satrapi had lived in France since the early 1990s, after her parents sent her to Europe as a teenager to escape the restrictions of life under the Islamic Republic regime. She was nine years old when Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979, and she later turned those years into Persepolis, the graphic novel that became a 2007 animated feature co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud. The film won the Jury Prize at Cannes and was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 2008 Academy Awards, helping make Satrapi internationally known far beyond the world of comics.

That success did not protect her from pressure at home. Satrapi was a lifelong activist against Iran’s Islamic Regime and the limits it placed on women and wider society, and in a 2023 interview she said she had received threats and slurs because of Persepolis and her activism. She said she had been called a liar and a spy, and that she had learned not to be scared, even while facing news of children in her country being shot at 17 years old.

Beyond Persepolis, she moved between animation and live action with work that included Chicken with Plums, Gang of the Jotas, The Voices and the 2019 biopic Radioactive, starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie. Her last film was Dear Paris, an ensemble dark comedy with Monica Bellucci, Roschdy Zem, Alex Lutz and André Dussollier. With Satrapi gone and no details released about where or how she died, what remains clear is that one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from Iranian exile has been cut short just as the private loss around her had become impossible to separate from the public legacy she built.