Mehran Karimi Nasseri Wiki – Mehran Karimi Nasseri Biography
An Iranian man who lived for 18 years at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport and whose saga loosely inspired Steven Spielberg’s film The Terminal has died at the airport he long called home. Mehran Karimi Nasseri, 76, died Saturday after a heart attack at the airport’s Terminal 2F around noon, according to a Paris airport authority official. Police and a medical team attended to him but were unable to save him.
Nasseri lived in Terminal 1 at the airport from 1988 to 2006, first in legal limbo because he did not have residency papers and then, apparently by choice. He slept on red plastic bench surrounded by boxes of newspapers and magazines and showered in the staff facility. He spent his time writing in his journal, reading magazines, studying economics, and surveying passing travelers.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri Age
Mehran Karimi Nasseri was 80 years old.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri Cause of Death
Nicknamed Lord Alfred by the staff, he became a mini-celebrity among the passengers. “Eventually, I’m going to leave the airport,” he told The Associated Press in 1999, smoking a pipe on his bench, looking frail with long, thin hair, deep-set eyes and sunken cheeks. “But I am still waiting for a passport or a transit visa.”
Nasseri was born in 1945 in Soleiman, a part of Iran then under British jurisdiction, to an Iranian father and a British mother. He left Iran to study in England in 1974. When he returned, he said, he was jailed for protesting against the shah and expelled without a passport.
He applied for political asylum in several European countries, including the United Kingdom, but was rejected. Finally, the UN refugee agency in Belgium gave him refugee credentials, but he said his briefcase containing the refugee certificate was stolen at a Paris train station.
The French police later arrested him, but could not deport him anywhere because he had no official documents. He ended up at Charles de Gaulle in August 1988, where he remained. More bureaucratic bungling and ever-tightening European immigration laws kept him in a legal no man’s land for years.
When he finally received the refugee papers, he described his surprise and insecurity at leaving the airport, the authority official said. He reportedly refused to sign them and ended up staying there for several more years until he was hospitalized in 2006 and then lived in a Paris shelter.
Those who befriended him at the airport said that years of living in the windowless space took a toll on his mental state. The airport doctor in the 1990s worried about his physical and mental health, describing him as “fossilized here”. A box-office friend compared him to a prisoner incapable of “living abroad.”
In the weeks before his death, Nasseri had returned to live at Charles de Gaulle. Nasseri’s hallucinatory story loosely inspired Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks, as well as a French film Lost in Transit and an opera called Flight. In The Terminal, Hanks plays Viktor Navorski, a man who arrives at New York’s JFK airport from the fictional.
Eastern European country of Krakozhia only to discover that an overnight political revolution has invalidated all his documents. Travel. Navorski is thrown into the airport’s international lounge and told that he must remain there until his condition is resolved, which drags on as the unrest in Krakozhia continues.
According to the New York Times, Spielberg purchased the rights to Nasseri’s life story through his production company DreamWorks, paying approximately $250,000. Nasseri also wrote an autobiography titled The Terminal Man published in 2004.
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