Farah Pahlavi

Farah Pahlavi (Persian: فرح پهلوی; née Diba [دیبا]; born 14 October 1938) is the former Queen and last Empress (شهبانو, Shahbânu) of Iran and is the widow of the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
She was born into a prosperous Iranian family whose fortunes were diminished after her father's early death. While studying architecture in Paris, she was introduced to the Shah at the Iranian embassy, and they were married in December 1959. The Shah's first two marriages had not produced a son—necessary for royal succession—resulting in great rejoicing at the birth of Crown Prince Reza in October of the following year. As a philanthropist, she advanced the welfare of Iranian civil society through the establishment of charities, and founded Iran's Shiraz University, Iran's first American-style university, increasing the number of women students. She also facilitated the recall of Iranian antiquities from museums abroad.
By 1978, growing anti-imperial unrest fueled by communism, socialism, and Islamism throughout Iran was showing clear signs of impending revolution, prompting Farah and the Shah to leave the country in January 1979 under the threat of a death sentence. For that reason, most countries were reluctant to harbour them, with Anwar Sadat's Egypt being an exception. Facing execution should he return, and in ill health, Mohammad Reza died in exile in July 1980. In widowhood, Farah has continued her charity work, dividing her time between Washington and Paris.
Farah Diba was born on 14 October 1938 in Tehran to an upper-class family. She was the only child of Captain Sohrab Diba (1899–1948) and his wife, Farideh Ghotbi (1920–2000). In her memoir, Farah writes that her father's family were natives of Iranian Azerbaijan while her mother's family were of Gilak origin, from Lahijan on the Iranian coast of the Caspian Sea.
In the late 19th century her grandfather had been a diplomat serving as the Persian Ambassador to the Romanov Court in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her own father was an officer in the Imperial Iranian Armed Forces and a graduate of the French Military Academy at St. Cyr.
Farah wrote in her memoir that she had a close bond with her father, and his unexpected death in 1948 deeply affected her. The young family was in a difficult financial state. In their reduced circumstances, they were forced to move from their large family villa in northern Tehran into a shared apartment with one of Farideh Ghotbi's brothers.
The young Farah Diba began her education at Tehran's Italian School, then moved to the French Jeanne d’Arc School until the age of sixteen and later to the Lycée Razi. She was an athlete in her youth, becoming captain of her school's basketball team. Upon finishing her studies at the Lycée Razi, she pursued an interest in architecture at the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris, where she was a student of Albert Besson.
Many Iranian students who were studying abroad at this time were dependent on State sponsorship. Therefore, when the Shah, as head of state, made official visits to foreign countries, he frequently met with a selection of local Iranian students. It was during such a meeting in 1959 at the Iranian Embassy in Paris that Farah Diba was first presented to Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
After returning to Tehran in the summer of 1959, Mohammad Reza and Farah Diba began their courtship. The couple announced their engagement on 23 November 1959.
Farah Diba married Shah Mohammed Reza on 20 December 1959, aged 21. The young Queen of Iran (as she was styled at the time) was the object of much curiosity and her wedding received worldwide press attention. Her gown was designed by Yves Saint Laurent, then a designer at the house of Dior, and she wore the newly commissioned Noor-ol-Ain Diamond tiara.
After the pomp and celebrations associated with the imperial wedding, the success of this union became contingent upon the queen's ability to produce a male heir. Although he had been married twice before, the Shah's previous marriages had given him only a daughter who, under agnatic primogeniture, could not inherit the throne. The pressure for Farah was acute. The shah himself was deeply anxious to have a male heir as were the members of his government. Furthermore, it was known that the dissolution of the Mohammad Reza's previous marriage to Queen Soraya had been due to her infertility.
The couple had four children:
The exact role the new queen would play, in public or government affairs, was uncertain with her main role being simply to give the Shah a male heir. Within the Imperial Household, her public function was secondary to the far more pressing matter of assuring the succession. However, after the birth of the Crown Prince, the Queen was free to devote more of her time to other activities and official pursuits.
Like many other royal consorts, Farah initially limited herself to a ceremonial role. In 1961 during a visit to France, the Francophile Farah befriended the French culture minister André Malraux, leading her to arrange the exchange of cultural artifacts between French and Iranian art galleries and museums, a lively trade that continued until the Islamic revolution of 1979. She spent much of her time attending the openings of various education and health-care institutions without venturing too deeply into controversial issues. However, as time progressed, this position changed. The Queen became much more actively involved in government affairs where it concerned issues and causes that interested her. She used her proximity and influence with her husband Mohammad Reza, to secure funding and focus attention on causes, particularly in the areas of women's rights and cultural development. Farah's concerns were the "realms of education, health, culture and social matters" with politics being excluded from her purview.
One of Farah's main initiatives was founding Pahlavi University (now Shiraz University), which was meant to improve the education of Iranian women, and was the first American-style university in Iran; before then, Iranian universities had always been modeled on the French style. The Empress wrote in 1978 that her duties were:
Farah worked long hours at her charitable activities, from about 9 am to 9 pm every weekday. Eventually, the Queen came to preside over a staff of 40 who handled various requests for assistance on a range of issues. She became one of the most highly visible figures in the Imperial Government and the patron of 24 educational, health and cultural organizations. Her humanitarian role earned her immense popularity for a time, particularly in the early 1970s. During this period, she travelled a great deal within Iran, visiting some of the more remote parts of the country and meeting with the local citizens.
Farah's significance was exemplified by her part in the 1967 Coronation Ceremonies, where she was crowned as the first shahbanu (empress) of modern Iran. It was again confirmed when the Shah named her as the official regent should he die or be incapacitated before the Crown Prince's 21st birthday. The naming of a woman as regent was highly unusual for a Middle Eastern or Muslim monarchy. The great wealth generated by Iran's oil encouraged a sense of Iranian nationalism at the Imperial Court. The Empress recalled of her days as a university student in 1950s France about being asked where she was from:
From the beginning of her royal life, Farah took an active interest in promoting culture and the arts in Iran. Through her patronage, numerous organizations were created and fostered to further her ambition of bringing historical and contemporary Iranian Art to prominence both inside Iran and in the Western world.
In addition to her own efforts, Farah sought to achieve this goal with the assistance of various foundations and advisers. Her ministry encouraged many forms of artistic expression, including traditional Iranian arts (such as weaving, singing, and poetry recital) as well as Western theatre. Her most recognized endeavour supporting the performing arts was her patronage of the Shiraz Arts Festival. This occasionally controversial event was held annually from 1967 until 1977 and featured live performances by both Iranian and Western artists.
The majority of her time, however, went into the creation of museums and the building of their collections.
As a former architecture student, Farah's appreciation of it is demonstrated in the Royal Palace of Niavaran, designed by Mohsen Foroughi, and completed in 1968: it mixes traditional Iranian architecture with 1960's contemporary design. Nearby is the personal library of the Empress, consisting of 22,000 books, comprising principally works on Western and Eastern art, philosophy and religion; the interior was designed by Aziz Farmanfarmayan.
Historically a culturally rich country, the Iran of the 1960s had little to show for it. Many of the great artistic treasures produced during its 2,500-year history had found their way into the hands of foreign museums and private collections. It became one of Farah's principal goals to procure for Iran an appropriate collection of its own historic artifacts. To that end, she secured from her husband's government permission and funds to "buy back" a wide selection of Iranian artifacts from foreign and domestic collections. This was achieved with the help of the brothers Houshang and Mehdi Mahboubian, the most prominent Iranian antiquities dealers of the era, who advised the Empress from 1972 to 1978. With these artifacts she founded several national museums (many of which still survive to this day) and began an Iranian version of the National Trust.
Museums and cultural centres created under her guidance include the Negarestan Cultural Center, the Reza Abbasi Museum, the Khorramabad Museum with its valuable collection of Lorestān bronzes, the National Carpet Gallery and the Glassware and Ceramic Museum of Iran.
Aside from building a collection of historic Iranian artifacts, Farah also expressed interest in acquiring contemporary Western and Iranian art. To this end, she put her significant patronage behind the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.
Using funds allocated from the government, the Shahbanu took advantage of a somewhat depressed art market of the 1970s to purchase several important works of Western art. Under her guidance, the museum acquired nearly 150 works by such artists as Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, George Grosz, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Roy Lichtenstein. The collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is considered to be one of the most significant outside Europe and the United States. The vast collection has been tastefully showcased in a large coffee table book published by Assouline titled Iran Modern According to Parviz Tanavoli, a modern Iranian sculptor and a former Cultural Adviser to the Empress, that the impressive collection was amassed for "tens, not hundreds, of millions of dollars". As of 2008, the value of these holdings are conservatively estimated to be near US$2.8 billion.
The collection created a conundrum for the anti-western Islamic Republic which took power after the fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty in 1979. Although politically the fundamentalist government rejected Western influence in Iran, the Western art collection amassed by Farah was retained, most likely due to its enormous value. It was, nevertheless, not publicly displayed and spent nearly two decades in storage in the vaults of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. This caused much speculation as to the fate of the artwork which was only put to rest after a large portion of the collection was briefly seen again in an exhibition that took place in Tehran during September 2005.
By early 1978, dissatisfaction with Iran's imperial government was pronounced. By the end of the year, citizens were holding demonstrations against the monarchy. Pahlavi wrote in her memoirs that "there was an increasingly palpable sense of unease". Under these circumstances most of the Shahbanu's official activities were cancelled due to concerns for her safety.
Riots and unrest grew more frequent and culminated in January 1979. The government enacted martial law in most major Iranian cities and the country was on the verge of an open revolution. Mohammad Reza and Farah departed Iran via aircraft on 16 January 1979.
For more than a year, the couple searched for permanent asylum. Many governments were unwilling to allow them within their borders because the revolutionary government in Iran had ordered the Shah and Shahbanu's arrest and death and it was not known how much it would pressure foreign powers.
Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who had maintained close relations with Mohammad Reza for years (and whose wife Jehan Sadat was friends with Farah), allowed them to stay in Egypt. They also spent time in Morocco, where they were guests of King Hassan II, and in the Bahamas. When their Bahamian visas were not renewed, they went to Mexico and rented a villa in Cuernavaca near Mexico City during the summer of 1979.
After leaving Egypt, Mohammad Reza's health further declined from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. In October 1979, the couple was allowed into the United States for medical treatment, inflaming already tense relations between the US government and the revolutionaries in Tehran. The tensions ultimately led to the attack and takeover of the American embassy in Tehran in what became known as the Iran hostage crisis. The Shah and Shahbanu were not permitted to remain in the United States, and shortly after the Shah's surgical treatment on 22 October 1979, the couple departed for Contadora Island in Panama. Both Mohammad Reza and Farah viewed the Carter administration with some antipathy in response to a lack of support.
Speculation arose that the Panamanian government was seeking to arrest Mohammad Reza in preparation for extradition to Iran. The Shah and Shahbanu again made an appeal to President Anwar Sadat to return to Egypt (Empress Farah writes that this plea was made through a conversation between herself and Jehan Sadat). Their request was granted and they returned to Egypt in March 1980, where they remained until the Shah's death four months later on 27 July 1980.
After the Shah's death, Farah spent two years in Egypt, where President Anwar Sadat allowed her and the children to stay in the Koubbeh Palace. She was the regent in pretence from 27 July to 31 October 1980. A few months after President Sadat's assassination in October 1981, Farah and her family left Egypt. President Ronald Reagan informed her that she was welcome in the United States.
Farah first settled in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and later bought a home in Greenwich, Connecticut. After the death of her daughter Princess Leila in 2001, she purchased a smaller home in Potomac, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. to be closer to her son and grandchildren. Farah divides her time between Washington, D.C. and Paris and makes an annual July visit to Mohammad Reza Shah's mausoleum at Cairo's al-Rifa'i Mosque.
Farah attended the funeral of former U.S. president Ronald Reagan in Washington, D.C. She supports charities, including the International Fund Raising for Alzheimer Disease gala in Paris.
Farah continues to appear at certain international royal events such as the 2004 wedding of Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, the 2010 wedding of Prince Nikolaos of Greece and Denmark, the 2011 wedding of Albert II, Prince of Monaco, the 2016 wedding of Prince Leka of Albania, the 2023 funeral of Constantine II of Greece, and the 2023 wedding of Crown Prince Hussein of Jordan.
In 2003, Farah wrote a book about her marriage to Mohammad Reza entitled An Enduring Love: My Life with the Shah. The publication of the former Empress's memoirs attracted international interest. It was a best-seller in Europe, with excerpts appearing in news magazines and the author appearing on talk shows and in other media outlets. However, opinion about the book, which Publishers Weekly called "a candid, straightforward account" and The Washington Post called "engrossing", was mixed.
Elaine Sciolino, The New York Times's Paris bureau chief, gave the book a less than flattering review, describing it as "well translated" but "full of anger and bitterness". But National Review's Reza Bayegan, an Iranian writer, praised the memoir as "abound[ing] with affection and sympathy for her countrymen."
In 2009 the Persian-Swedish director Nahid Persson Sarvestani released a feature length documentary about Farah Pahlavi's life, entitled The Queen and I. The film was screened in various International film festivals such as IDFA and Sundance. In 2012 the Dutch director Kees Roorda made a theatre play inspired by the life of Farah Pahlavi in exile. In the play Liz Snoijink acted as Farah Diba.