The Iranian Refugee Who Impressed 2004’s The Terminal Useless at 76

Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the Iranian man who lived in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1998 to 2006 and impressed the Steven Spielberg movie The Terminal, is useless at 76 after struggling a coronary heart assault within the airport’s Terminal 2F on November twelfth.

In accordance with CNN, Nasseri had lately returned to the placement the place he had first gained notoriety as a refugee who spent 18 years at de Gaulle’s Terminal 1. He had been residing on the premises since “mid-September, after a keep in a nursing dwelling” and was pronounced useless by an airport medical group.

Nasseri was born in Soleiman, Iran in 1945. He traveled to check in England in 1974 and was promptly exiled from his dwelling nation upon his return for “protesting the regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi,” per The New York Times. He turned stranded on the Paris airport in August 1988 after allegedly dropping his residency credentials whereas in transit to hunt asylum. Though the quite a few authorized obstacles that prevented his launch have been finally cleared, Nasseri in the end determined to remain on his personal volition till he was hospitalized in July 2006.

“Sir Alfred,” as he was dubbed by the airport workers, turned a staple of the terminal and spent almost twenty years sleeping on a bench in an enclave of the general public house, studying magazines, writing in his diary, and smoking his pipe. His predicament finally caught the eye of Spielberg, who bought the rights to Nasseri’s life story for roughly $250,000. The end result was 2004’s The Terminal, which starred Tom Hanks as a European immigrant from the fictional nation Krakozhia, who will get caught in limbo at New York’s JFK Airport after an in a single day coup renders his touring papers invalid.

Nasseri’s memoir, The Terminal Man, coincided with the movie’s launch in 2004.