Mattias Ripa outlives Marjane Satrapi by a year after 56-year career
Marjane Satrapi died at 56, a little over a year after Mattias Ripa’s death. For readers who tracked her work through Persepolis and Radioactive, the news closes one of the most visible careers in Iranian-French film and graphic storytelling.
Satrapi and Ripa
A statement from close friends and family said, “Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life.” Ripa died on April 8, 2025. The wording places his death at the center of the timeline around hers, and it leaves her final year of life as part of the public record around her passing.
Satrapi was an Iranian French artist, animator, and Oscar-nominated director. She had lived in France since the early 1990s after her parents sent her to Europe to study as a teenager. That move shaped the career that later made her internationally known.
Persepolis to Radioactive
Satrapi was best known internationally for Persepolis and Radioactive. In 2007, she co-directed Persepolis with Vincent Paronnaud; the animated feature won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 2008 Academy Awards, along with an Annie Awards nomination.
In 2011, Satrapi and Paronnaud reunited for Chicken with Plums, which premiered in competition in Venice. She moved into live action with Gang of the Jotas in 2012, starred in it opposite Mattias Ripa, and then directed Ryan Reynolds and Gemma Arterton in The Voices in 2014. Her 2019 biopic Radioactive cast Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie.
Activism and threats
Satrapi was also a lifelong activist against Iran’s Islamic regime and the restrictions it placed on women and wider society. In a 2023 interview, she said, “I’ve been called a liar and a spy. I’ve learned in life not to be scared” and added, “It’s not that you don’t feel fear; you feel the fear, but then you decide whether you care about it or not.”
She also said, “It’s not that I’m fearless or careless but there are kids in my country who are being shot and they are 17 years old, while I have lived for more than half a century.” That context gives her death a sharper edge than a simple career obituary: it ends the public life of a filmmaker whose work, from Persepolis to Dear Paris, kept returning to the same political fault lines.
Her last film was the ensemble dark comedy Dear Paris, with Monica Bellucci, Roschdy Zem, Alex Lutz, and André Dussollier in the cast. The record now ends there, with the work still standing and the loss arriving just over a year after Ripa’s death.
