Iranian-born actress Golshifteh Farahani has found herself at the center of a major political scandal after a new book claimed she exchanged messages with French President Emmanuel Macron and the messages that allegedly led his wife Brigitte to slap him during a foreign trip last year.
Journalist Florian Tardif, in his book “An (Almost) Perfect Couple,” claimed that Brigitte who is 73, read a message from Farahani on her husband’s phone moments before the now-viral incident as the couple prepared to disembark their plane in Hanoi, Vietnam, according to the New York Post. However, both Farahani and Brigitte’s representatives have denied the claims.
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Here is what you need to know about the actress:
- Golshifteh Farahani was born on July 10 in 1983 in Tehran, Iran. She began her acting career in theater at just six years old and landed her first film role at 14 in The Pear Tree (1998) for which she won the Best Actress prize at the international section of the Fajr Film Festival.
- She was banned in Iran after she became the first Iranian actress after the 1979 revolution to appear in a major Hollywood production when she starred alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies (2008).
- Despite being banned from Iran, Farahani continued to build an impressive international career. Her last film made in Iran, About Elly (2009) has won a Silver Bear in Berlin and the Best Narrative Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival. She has since lived in Paris in France and is fluent in English, French and Farsi, according to IMDb.
- Golshifteh Farahani is known as a strong critic of the Iranian regime. She is also a trained musician who sings and plays the piano. In The Music Man, she played the piano herself. Her underground rock band “Kooch” won first prize at the Tehran Avenue Underground Rock Festival in 2003, all of this even after rock music and women singing are both banned in Iran is a remarkable achievement.
- She has been married twice. Her first marriage was to Amin Mahdavi, from 2003 to 2011. She was then briefly married to French actor Louis Garrel from 2012 to 2014, according to IMDb. As for the current scandal, Farahani has flatly denied any romantic involvement with President Macron.
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As per the New York Post, “I think that there is a lack of love for some people and they need to create romances like this to fill [the void],” she told Le Point in March regarding her current scandal with Macron. Brigitte Macron’s team has also categorically denied the account, with a representative telling Le Parisien that Brigitte “never looks at her husband’s mobile phone.” President Macron, for his part, has insisted the moment caught on camera was simply the couple “joking around,” per the New York Post.
