Golshifteh Farhani ... "It was a catastrophe."

Golshifteh Farhani ... "It was a catastrophe." Photo: Getty Images

In January of this year the parents of the exiled Iranian actor Golshifteh Farahani took a call at their apartment in Tehran from a man who said he was an official of the supreme court of the Islamic Republic. He began shouting at her father, telling him that his daughter would be punished, that her breasts would be cut off and presented to him on a plate.

A few days earlier, Farahani had appeared in a short black-and-white video with 30 other "young hopes" of the French cinema to promote the Cesars, the "French Oscars", where she had been nominated for her role in the winsome immigrant comedy Si Tu Meurs, Je Te Tue (If You Die, I'll Kill You).

‘It was a big shock for me and my family and for the whole of Iranian society. The good thing is it started a huge debate. I was watching people insult me, others answering them, others defending me, others attacking again. 

The promo had each actor take off an item of clothing as they stared into the camera to commit their "body and soul" to their art. Farahani chose to bare her right breast, saying: "I will put flesh to your dreams."

A still from the video.

A still from the video.

What followed in Iran was little short of a cultural earthquake.

"It was a catastrophe," she remembers, her head dropping into her hands. "I don't know exactly how many tens of millions of people typed my name into Google the next day, I don't want to know ..." A taboo of unimaginable proportions had been shattered, and not by some publicity-hungry provocateur, but by the most loved and admired actor in the country. Farahani may have only been another 29-year-old hopeful in France, but in Iran she became a star the moment she appeared in Dariush Mehrjui's The Pear Tree at 14. Eighteen films later there is more than a little of Garbo, Jeanne Moreau and Irene Papas about her: a rare beauty and intelligence married to a burning emotional honesty in a country where truth of any kind is hard to come by.

In M for Mother she seared herself into the national consciousness playing a pregnant woman gassed during the Iran-Iraq war, abandoned by her husband and now carrying "a gift from God" in her womb. Both rural and urban Iran embraced her as their down-to-earth hero: Golshifteh, the star without airs. Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis who directed her in Chicken with Plums, says: "She was not just Iran, she was the mother of Iran."

The day the video was posted, the official Fars news agency in Tehran issued a communique saying that the pictures showed the "hidden, disgusting face of cinema". This kind of opprobrium had never before been poured on an artist, however much they had upset the regime. Her exile was now a banishment.

Farahani had already been banned from working by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance for not wearing a headscarf at the New York premiere of Ridley Scott's CIA thriller Body of Lies, where, playing opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, she became the first Iranian actress to appear in a Hollywood film since the 1979 revolution.

The film's critical take on the CIA - which overthrew Iran's last freely elected government in 1953 - cut little ice with the ayatollahs, who took her passport away. Four years ago, with doors closing all around her amid a pre-election crackdown that would eventually spark the green revolution, Farahani fled to France after being in effect fined the impossible-to-pay sum of EUR2m. When she spoke out from Paris in favour of the failed green revolution, she was told not to return.

In a final twist of the knife, the censors banned the last film she made there, Asghar Farhadi's About Elly, even before it was shown. Like many before her, Farahani had quietly ignored the ban to take the lead role, hoping it would all blow over.

Strangely, it would never have seen the light of day, nor have won the Silver Bear at Berlin, had it not been saved by an unlikely intervention from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself, who said it was "not fair that a film be condemned by the mistake of one actress".

But that was before she slipped her shoulder out of her shirt and became a lightning conductor for the divisions within Iranian society. Ahmadinejad is never likely to be so forgiving again.

Farahani insists, however, that she did not set out to shock or provoke. "I hate politics. It is not my job. As always, something you do for nothing becomes political. I knew it would be difficult. But I am living in France now, I have to work here, and either I am living here or I am not.


But Farahani doesn't want to be a "Joan of Arc, an actress 'with a story', an exotic victim of persecution. Exile is like death. The whole world wants to see you as a victim and they push you to be even more a victim because they see you miserable and they feel good. That is why French people are so obsessed with causes like Syria. It is a kind of pornography to make them feel better about being themselves, but they don't give a shit. They say, 'Come, we will look after you,' and then they f--- you up and don't give you papers. I am just an actor, and I want to work."

That said, she is hugely grateful to France. "For the first time in my life I appreciated being a woman. Paris is a city that liberates you as a woman from all your sins that you think you are guilty of, it washes away all of that and you are free."

She pulls a white scarf around her shoulders. It's her old headscarf, "my old friend". "The biggest problem for Iranian actresses," she says is not the government but the world outside "who think we come out of our mothers with our heads covered".

"Look at Leila Hatami. Normally after winning an Oscar [for Farhadi's A Separation] you get lots of work. But nothing is happening and she speaks four languages."

But Farahani won't be held. She has two more films coming out this autumn in France, a new road movie shot in the US with Sienna Miller, and the almost made-to-measure lead in Atiq Rahimi's The Patience Stone, which he adapted from his own Goncourt prize-winning novel about an Afghan woman standing guard over the body of her husband.

"I have scars from every film I have made," she says, lifting her sleeve and leg to show me. "There is nothing to protect actors. They treat you worse than a dog. You work like a slave, and you know I like it. That is the way it should be. Every film should be like your last."