Forced into exile when the ayatollahs imposed a theocracy in Iran, the late shah and his family have been vilified by the regime for 46 years. Yet Farah Pahlavi, the shah’s widow and Iran’s last queen, says she still enjoys the affection and support of ordinary Iranians.
“They send me emails with their telephone numbers. And I call them, and it’s very strange because they recognise my voice,” she said. “And they say: ‘Hello shahbanu [queen consort]’. And I say: ‘Don’t say that’ because I’m afraid the [Iranian] government is listening to them.
“But after all the lies that [Iran’s religious rulers] have said about us … I am very happy to see and hear the sympathy and kindness of my compatriots before I die.”
Pahlavi, 86, was speaking to The Times in her vast flat overlooking the Seine where she lives for part of the year, the rest being spent mainly in America.
The interview came about because a biographical film is set to tell the extraordinary story of the woman whose beauty was considered to eclipse even Jackie Kennedy, the former US first lady.
The film is likely to serve as a reminder of the luxury in which Pahlavi lived after becoming the shah’s third wife in 1959. For her wedding she wore a diamond tiara designed by Harry Winston, an American jeweller, and a Dior bridal gown adorned with so many pearls and rhinestones that it weighed 15kg.
The movie is also likely to feature the tragedies she has known, notably during the exile that began with the overthrow of the shah in 1979. Her husband died from cancer, aged 60, in Egypt a year later, and two of their four children took their own lives, which Pahlavi said was due to their despair at the upheavals.
On a warm spring day in Paris, Pahlavi was a little hoarse, coughing occasionally. But sitting on the sofa as the setting sun bathed her apartment, her bearing remained regal.
She said she hoped the ayatollahs’ regime would one day fall to make way for a free, democratic Iran. “I always remain positive,” she said, although several times during the conversation she did nothing to disguise her dismay at the present situation: “It’s unbelievable really that a country like Iran with such a great civilisation and history should be ruled by these people.”
She does not appear to have much faith in the West’s willingness to bring about change, at least not out of any commitment to freedom and democracy. The US, UK and other western countries only look after their own interests, she said, adding: “If they feel that this [status quo] is not in their interest, they will do something about it.”
The latest example of what she perceives as western high-handedness came last week when President Trump said he was considering changing the name of the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Gulf. Trump said he would make a final decision during his visit to the Middle East this week, although Iranians are furious that he is even thinking about it. The queen shares the indignation — a rare point of convergence with the regime.
“The Persian Gulf has been the Persian Gulf for centuries,” she said, suggesting that Trump was trying to gain the favour of Arab nations. “I mean, they cannot just change the name because of their interest,” she said.
The US-produced film, due out in 2027, is to be directed by Emily Atef, the French-Iranian filmmaker, with Juliette Towhidi, the British-Iranian scriptwriter, working on the project too.
There should be enough to say about the queen’s life to make a memorable movie. She was studying architecture in Paris — a notable choice given that there was only one other female Iranian architect — when she caught the shah’s eye after his divorce from his second wife.
They went on to meet at the home of his daughter from his first marriage, whom Pahlavi knew. “I had gone there to see [his daughter] and then suddenly, his majesty appears. I say to myself: ‘OK, he has come to see his daughter’.”
It proved to be the first of three “fortuitous” meetings in the shah’s daughter’s home, and on the third occasion “he asked me to marry him. It was unbelievable.” In a comment rich with significance on the reality of royal weddings, she said: “I was in love with his majesty, and his majesty also chose me.”
In The Fall of Heaven, The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran, Andrew Scott Cooper, a historian, writes that when Pahlavi arrived with the shah for an official visit to the US in 1962, she outshone Kennedy with her “jewel-encrusted gown spun of gold thread, a diamond and emerald necklace, and a diamond-encrusted tiara that resembled a bird’s nest holding seven giant emeralds the size of robins’ eggs”.
Five years later, when the shah had himself crowned shahanshah — king of kings — the couple were taken back to their palace “in a gold coach specially built for the occasion by Viennese craftsmen and drawn by eight magnificent white Hungarian stallions”.
It was not all the stuff of fairy tales. Critics accused the shah — whose father, a Cossack brigade commander of modest origin had seized power in a British-backed military coup in the 1920s — of extravagant opulence as his reign became increasingly brutal.
Pahlavi said she was worried that the new film would focus on “the police torturing and putting [people] into jail, as if [the shah’s reign] was only that”. She suggested that her husband was not behind the brutality and that he should be remembered for modernising his country, with land distributed to peasants, the emancipation of women and investment in education.
She played a part in reform as well. In the 1970s, as oil money poured into Iran, she persuaded her husband to spend some of it on one of her pet projects, a contemporary art museum in Tehran.
Pahlavi bought for it contemporary works now estimated to be worth $3 billion and said to be the greatest collection in the world outside the US and Europe.
The likes of Claude Monet, Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, René Magritte, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol — who created an artwork featuring Pahlavi — and Max Ernst all feature.
Pahlavi said she bought Jackson Pollock’s Mural on Indian Red Ground for $1 million. It is now valued at $250 million.
When they gained power, the ayatollahs took a dim view of some of the works, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Gabrielle with Open Blouse, which they said showed too much flesh. It was put in a basement.
Last year much of the collection went on display in an exhibition in Tehran entitled Eye to Eye. The event was so popular that it had to be prolonged.
Pahlavi said its success showed that, despite almost half a century of religious rule, the Iranians’ hunger for art and culture is as strong as ever.
