The 77-year-old Iranian refugee whose ordeal inspired the 2004 movie “The Terminal” died Saturday inside the Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, where he had previously lived for 18 years.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri died around noon local time of a heart attack, a spokesperson for the Paris airport authority said Sunday. “He was an iconic, charismatic character. There is a lot of emotion at the airport in the wake of his death.”Nasseri was beloved by airport staff, who mourned his passing this weekend, the spokesperson said.
The 2004 Steven Spielberg film, set at JFK International Airport in New York, starred Tom Hanks as an Eastern European man who gets stuck in the transit zone after a coup in his fictitious home country upends his legal status. In the end, the protagonist leaves the airport, briefly fulfills his father’s mission and then heads home.
But Nasseri’s decades-long immigration struggles were far more complicated. Over the years, he provided some conflicting details of his life, but ultimately there was no Hollywood ending.Nasseri was either exiled or fled political turmoil in Iran in the 1970s and settled in Belgium for many years.
Caught in an immigration trap, he soon set up a makeshift home of his own in the airport and lived for many years in Terminal 1.
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