Man Who Inspired “The Terminal” Dies at Airport
(NewsSpace.com) – Steven Spielberg’s “The Terminal,” tells the fictitious story of a political refugee stranded at New York’s JFK Airport. The main character becomes a fixture at the facility, and a happy-go-lucky story ensues. In real life, however, Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the man Spielberg loosely based his story on, had a far more tragic life that only recently ended.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who lived for 18 years in Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris and whose story inspired the Steven Spielberg 2004 film “The Terminal,” died on Saturday in the same airport where he spent so much of his life. https://t.co/JnDseFAKxd pic.twitter.com/XeEf2fN2qA
— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 14, 2022
On November 12, police in Paris answered a call from Charles de Gaulle Airport, where Nasseri had suffered a heart attack. He had recently moved back to Terminal 2F, where he lived from 1988 to 2006, after a stay in a shelter. Unfortunately, first responders weren’t able to save him.
Nasseri’s tale is long and complicated. Born to an Iranian father and a British mother, he claimed he left Iran in 1974, before the revolution, and returned only to be imprisoned for speaking out against the shah. He was supposedly expelled without a passport, leaving him in the predicament at the airport in Paris.
Much like the film, Nasseri made friends with employees and became a bit of a celebrity with some passengers, but that’s about where the similarities ended. After some years and a couple of residency offers, it became clear the man may not have had the ability to function after nearly two decades without any form of normalcy.
Have you ever watched the film? What did you think?
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