Mehran Karimi Nasseri has passed away at the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle facility, the same place where he lived for more than 18 years
Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the Iranian refugee who inspired director Steven Spielberg’s film ‘The Terminal’, died on Saturday at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport, northeast of Paris, at the age of 77. Nasseri, who called himself ‘Sir Alfred’, died of natural causes in the afternoon, according to the AFP agency. ‘Sir Alfred’, who lived in Terminal 1 of that Paris airport for more than 18 years, was born in 1945 in Masjed Soleiman, Khuzestan province, Iran. He was 20 years old when his father, an Iranian doctor, died. He made the decision to look for his mother, a British nurse, who never recognized him.
After a long journey that took him to London, Berlin and Amsterdam, Nassari arrived at the Paris airport in November 1988, after the British authorities refused him entry because he did not have the correct papers. The police in his country took away his passport and the British authorities had denied him citizenship.
In an illegal situation, he settled in a red chair at Paris International Airport and made it his new home. At first he went unnoticed among the thousands of travelers who stopped at the airport until the press did his curious story and became the most famous “homeless person” in the world. In 1999 he obtained refugee status in France and a residence permit, but Nasseri did not want to leave the airport.
It inspired two films: ‘Tombé du ciel’ (‘In transit’, 1994) by French director Philippe Lioret and ‘La Terminal’ (2004), the dramatic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Spielberg was inspired for the film by his bizarre life, although the Hollywood writers changed the story to make him Victor Navorski (Tom Hanks), a citizen of a fictional European country who gets stuck at the John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York. .
Two years after the premiere of ‘The Terminal’, Alfred left the airport for the first time in 2006 to be admitted to hospital. In recent years he lived in a hostel in Paris. After spending a large part of the money he received for the film (300,000 euros, according to the French press), he had returned to the airport a few weeks ago. When he died, he had several thousand euros with him, according to AFP. ‘Sir Alfred’ never got to fulfill his dream of living in the United States, he died in terminal 2F of Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport, which he considered his home for 18 years.
Source: La Verdad
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