Mehrdad Pahlbod
Mehrdad Pahlbod (; 16 March 1917 – 9 August 2018), born as Ezatollah Minbashian (), was an Iranian politician who served as the first culture minister of Iran from 1964 until the 1978. Life. Pahlbod was born in Tehran into the musical family of Minbashian. His father was Colonel Nasru'llah Minbashian, Imperial Iranian Army Band Corps. His relative Gholam-Hossein Minbashian, a professional violinist, was the conductor of Tehran City Hall Symphony Orchestra (later Tehran Symphony Orchestra) and the director of Tehran Conservatory of Music for years. Pahlbod studied architecture in Switzerland and in the late 1950s became the vice president  of the Persian Fine Arts Administration in Tehran; an organisation which later became the Iranian Ministry of Culture. He was a violinist and music teacher, Director-General of the Department of Fine Arts in 1956, Deputy in the Ministry of Education until 1961 and Minister for Culture and the Arts between 1964 and 1978, and received the Order of Homayoun 1st Class, the Order of the Crown 4th Class, the Coron Medal in Gold in 1967 and the 2,500-year celebration of the Persian Empire Medal in Gold on 15 October 1971, was Knight of Grand-Cross of the Order  of Merit of the Italian Republic of Italy on 15 December 1974, etc. Mehrdad Pahlbod was also the second husband of Princess Shams Pahlavi. The couple secretly converted to Catholic Christianity from Shia Islam in the 1950s in Egypt. In the years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Pahlbod lived in exile in Los Angeles where he died on 9 August 2018 at the age of 101.