Stuck in legal limbo, Mehran Karimi Nasseri lived at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris between 1988 and 2006, and inspired the 2004 film “The Terminal.”
NBC News/YouTubeMehran Karimi Nasseri at Charles de Gaulle airport.
For nearly 20 years, Mehran Karimi Nasseri lived in an airport. An alleged Iranian refugee lacking proper documentation, Nasseri had bounced around Europe for several years before he found himself in international legal limbo after his identity papers were purportedly stolen in Paris. With no where else to go, Nasseri set up a home at Charles De Gaulle Airport in 1988.
For the next 18 years, he stayed there.
A familiar face to airport staff at Charles de Gaulle — who nicknamed him Lord Alfred or Sir Alfred because of a mistake made by British immigration officials — Nasseri slowly became something of a celebrity. In 2003, director Steven Spielberg even bought the rights to his story and later used it as the basis for his 2004 film The Terminal with Tom Hanks.
But Nasseri’s life story is quite different from Hanks’ character, Viktor Navorski. And Mehran Karimi Nasseri’s relationship with Charles de Gaulle Airport ultimately lasted much longer than Navorski’s did with JFK.
This is the peculiar story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri.
How Mehran Karimi Nasseri Came To Live In Charles De Gaulle Airport
Mehran Karimi Nasseri was born in 1945 in the Iranian town of Masjid-i-Sulaiman. However, concrete details about his early life are difficult to verify, as Nasseri many offered conflicting stories over the years. According to a 2003 profile of him in New York Times Magazine, he sometimes said his mother was English, sometimes that she was Swedish; at one point, he denied that he was Persian or that he could speak Persian.
YouTubeMehran Karimi Nasseri reading the paper in the airport.
But a 2004 feature in The Guardian dug up some truths about Nasseri. The Guardian found that Nasseri had enjoyed an “idyllic” childhood in Tehran but that things had changed for him in his young adulthood.
Nasseri claimed that he learned that he was illegitimate upon his father’s death. He said that he was rejected from his family, and that he then went to England to study Yugoslav economics. The part about the economics is true, but The Guardian also found that he lived with his brother while in England — so he wasn’t entirely rejected. Then, in the 1970s, Nasseri returned to Iran.
At this point, he participated in a a student strike at Tehran University and was questioned among others by the Iranian secret police. Nasseri would later claim that he had been imprisoned, tortured, and exiled because of his opposition to the Shah, but The Guardian found no evidence for that.
Whatever happened between Mehran Karimi Nasseri and the secret police, it lead to a permanent rupture. Nasseri left Iran. Instead, he went to Europe, where he was granted refugee status by Belgium in 1981.
He traveled throughout Europe for years without incident, but things got complicated in the late 1980s. Then, Nasseri claimed that his passport and refugee certificate were stolen in Paris. Though Nasseri successfully traveled from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris to Heathrow Airport in London, British officials refused to let him enter the country without proper documentation. Instead, they sent him back to Charles de Gaulle.
And so it was that Mehran Karimi Nasseri found himself in Terminal One of the Charles de Gaulle Airport, stuck in international legal limbo, with nowhere else to call home.
The Man Who Spent Years Living In Charles De Gaulle Airport
Wikimedia CommonsNasseri’s bench inside Terminal One.
As days because months, and then months became years, Mehran Karimi Nasseri settled into his life at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Though the French insisted he was in the country illegally, they could not deport him because no other country would take him. So Nasseri simply lived at the airport.
His new life was strangely routine. Nasseri would start each morning by going to the airport bathroom to clean up, then would wash his clothes and hang them over his suitcase to dry. He went frequently to McDonalds for meals, where he habitually enjoyed McDonald’s breakfast sandwich for breakfast and a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish for lunch. To pass the time, Nasseri read newspapers (sometimes given to him for free), collected soda caps, and wrote about his life in a journal which came to span 1,000 pages.
“The airport is not bad,” Nasseri remarked to The New York Times in 1999. “It is very active and functions every day. I see different passengers every week from all over the world.”
Meanwhile, he started to become a familiar face to the people who worked in the airport, who nicknamed him “Alfred” or “Sir Alfred” because a mistake British immigration officials had made in a letter about his case. Airport employees gave him their food vouchers, and flight attendants gave him toiletries that their first class passengers had left behind.
The wider world noticed Mehran Karimi Nasseri as well. Three documentaries were made about the man living in the airport, and director Steven Spielberg bought the rights to Nasseri’s story in 2003. They served as the inspiration for Spielberg’s 2004 film The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks.
DreamWorks PicturesTom Hanks in The Terminal, a film loosely inspired by Mehran Nasseri’s life.
In the film, Hanks’s character Viktor Navorski becomes trapped at John F. Kennedy Airport after a coup d’etat in his native country. Like Nasseri, Navorski settles into life at the airport and becomes a familiar face to many airport employees. But though Navorski had reasons for wanting to leave the airport, Nasseri seemed perfectly content to stay.
How Mehran Karimi Nasseri Left The Airport — And Then Returned Again
Over the years, some people became concerned about Mehran Karimi Nasseri. A doctor at Charles de Gaulle worried that he’d “fossilized” at his bench, and a ticket agent who’d become Nasseri’s friend fretted that he was incapable of “living on the outside.” Indeed, when Nasseri was offered a chance to leave the airport in 1999, he initially demurred.
At that point, the French offered him identity papers. If he signed them, he would be free to leave the airport. But Nasseri refused purportedly because the papers identified him as Iranian and because they didn’t include his new name, Sir Alfred. The truth, the airport’s medical director told The New York Times, was that Nasseri was “scared to leave this bubble world.”
“Finally getting the papers has been a huge shock to him, as if he was just thrown from his horse,” the medical director continued. “When you wait 11 years for something and suddenly in a few minutes you sign some papers and it’s done — imagine what a shock that is.”
In 2006, however, Nasseri did leave Charles de Gaulle airport. He was taken to the hospital to be treated for an illness, and then used the money he’d earned from selling his story to Spielberg to live in a hostel. However, Nasseri never forgot the 18 years that he’d spent at Charles de Gaulle Airport.
At the very end of his life, he returned. And on Nov. 12, 2022, Mehran Karimi Nasseri died of a heart attack while sitting in Terminal 2F.
In a statement following his death, Charles de Gaulle Airport noted that its staff had cared for Mehran Karimi Nasseri “as much as possible for many years” but that “we would have preferred that he find a real shelter, as he was suffering from psychological problems.”
After reading about Mehran Karimi Nassari’s fascinating life inside Terminal One, read about Paul Alexander, the man who lived in an iron lung for 72 years. Then, read about Dick Proenneke, the man who lived alone in the Alaskan wilderness for 30 years.
