Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian-born refugee, died in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport on November 12 after having lived there for the last 18 years. The bizarre story and the circumstances that led to Nasseri's exile from Iran were supposedly the inspiration for the 2004 film The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones. According to The Guardian, a Paris airport official said Nasseri died after a heart attack in the airport’s Terminal 2F. The official added that despite assistance from a medical team and the police, he couldn’t be saved. Who was Mehran Karimi Nasseri? Nasseri was born in the oil-rich south Iranian province of Khuzestan in 1945, according to an official account of his life, which he would himself later dispute. His father was a doctor who worked for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Nasseri had five siblings. When he was 23, and shortly after his father died due to cancer, he was informed by his mother that she was not his biological mother and his father had an affair with a Scottish nurse. After this revelation, Nasseri went to Britain, where he pursued Yugoslav Studies for three years at the University of Bradford. There, he also participated in a protest against the ruling regime back home – Iranian authorities would later use this as a reason to strip him of his passport when he returned to Tehran. How did he come to reside in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport? In 1981, Nasseri was granted refugee status by a UN agency in Belgium. He then tried to travel to Britain to find his biological mother, who he believed was residing in Glasgow. It was at this point that he discarded his identification papers on an England-bound ship, convinced that he no longer needed them. This was how he fell into a stateless limbo, and this was the part of his life that Spielberg depicted in The Terminal. He was repeatedly detained in the UK on arrival and sent back to Belgium or France. In August 1988, he gave up his attempts and settled down at the Charles de Gaulle airport, where he lived till 2006. According to The Guardian, at first, he lived there because of the legal limbo he found himself in due to a lack of documents; later, he simply chose to do so. At the airport, Nasseri was usually found on a red bench on the lower floor of Terminal 1. Reportedly, he would decline donations and gifts, apart from the occasional meal voucher from airport staff. When asked by a journalist in 2003 whether he felt angry about having lost 15 years of his life living at an airport terminal, he said: “No angry. I just want to know who my parents are.” According to people who had known him while he lived at the airport, Nasseri’s mental health was affected by years of living in a windowless space. A doctor at the airport had described him as “fossilised here”, worrying about his physical and mental health. , A ticket agent friend also once compared Nasseri to a prisoner who cannot live outside. Nasseri had returned to live at the airport in recent weeks, the airport official said. After leaving the airport, he spent some time at a hospital for an operation; then, at a hotel near the airport, allegedly paid for with the money he’d received for film rights for his life, The New York Times reported. Eventually, he wound up living at a shelter for homeless people, according to the official. Depictions in media Nasseri’s extraordinary life has been the basis of several fictionalisations as well as documentaries. Philippe Lioret’s 1993 French film Lost in Transit was reportedly inspired by Nasseri. Ten years later, a short story chronicling his life was published in the magazine GQ, written by Michal Paterniti and titled ‘The 15 Year Layover’. In 2004, an autobiography ghostwritten by the British author Andrew Donkin was published – called The Terminal Man. In 1998, British composer Jonathan Dove composed the award-winning contemporary opera Flight, which was partly based on Nasseri’s life story. In 2001, Hamid Rahmanian and Melissa Hibbard made a documentary called Sir Alfred of Charles de Gaulle Airport. A documentary was also made by Alexis Kouros in 2000– the title, Waiting for Godot at de Gaulle, was derived from Samuel Beckett’s absurdist drama Waiting for Godot, where the two lead characters are seen waiting for someone who never comes. In fact, it is never even clear if they themselves know who or what they are waiting for. A mockumentary, Here to Where, was directed by Glen Luchford and Paul Berczeller, and also featured Nasseri. It was widely speculated that Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), the protagonist of Spielberg’s The Terminal was based on Nasseri’s experiences. However, nowhere was this officially acknowledged. In 2003, an article in The New York Times said that the director had bought the rights to Nasseri’s life story. Berczeller, who spent a year with Nasseri, wrote in The Guardian in 2004 that the airport resident “proudly hung” a poster of the film from a suitcase next to his bench. Berczeller also noted that Nasseri called himself "Sir Alfred Mehran", a name that had appeared on one of his letters of correspondence with British authorities. According to Berczeller, ‘Alfred’ had received a “cheque of several hundred thousand dollars for his life story” and was under the impression that he was going to go to California. The first thing he said to Berczeller when he saw him was, “I am famous now.”
