An Iranian man who lived for 18 years at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport and whose saga loosely inspired the Steven Spielberg film The Terminal has died at the airport he had long called home. Mehran Karimi Nasseri, 76, died on Saturday after suffering a heart attack at the airport’s Terminal 2F around noon, according to a Paris airport authority official. Police and medical team treated him but could not save him. Nasseri lived in the airport’s Terminal 1 from 1988 to 2006, initially in a legal vacuum because he lacked residency papers and later, apparently by choice. He slept on a red plastic bench surrounded by boxes of newspapers and magazines and showered in the staff facilities. He spent his time writing in his journal, reading magazines, studying economics, and researching passing travelers. The staff nicknamed him Lord Alfred and he became a mini-celebrity among the passengers. “Eventually, I’ll leave the airport,” he told The Associated Press in 1999, smoking a pipe on his bench, looking frail with long thin hair, sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. “But I’m 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 imprisoned for protesting against the shah and deported without a passport. He applied for political asylum in several countries in Europe, including the United Kingdom, but was rejected. Eventually, the UN refugee agency in Belgium gave him refugee credentials, but he said his briefcase containing the refugee certificate was stolen in a Paris train station. French police later arrested him but could not deport him anywhere because he had no official documents. It ended up at Charles de Gaulle in August 1988, where it stayed. Further red tape and increasingly strict European immigration laws kept him in legal land for years. When he finally received refugee papers, he described his surprise – and his insecurity – at leaving the airport, the authorities official said. He reportedly refused to sign them and ended up staying there for several more years until he was hospitalized in 2006 and later lived in a shelter in Paris. Those who befriended him at the airport said the years of living in the windowless space took a toll on his mental state. The airport doctor in the 1990s was concerned about his physical and mental health and described him as “petrified here”. A friend of the ticket agent compared him to a prisoner unable to “live outside”. In the weeks before his death, Nasseri had returned to live at Charles de Gaulle. Nasseri’s harrowing 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 Navorsky, a man who arrives at New York’s JFK Airport from the fictional Eastern European country of Krakosia and discovers that an overnight political revolution has canceled all of his travel documents. Navorski is flown to the airport’s international lounge and is told to stay there until his situation is resolved, which continues as the unrest in Krakow continues. According to the New York Times, Spielberg bought the rights to Nasseri’s life story through his production company DreamWorks, paying around $250,000. Nasseri also wrote an autobiography titled The Terminal Man which was published in 2004.
