Iranian architect turned actor Homayoun Ershadi, who is best known internationally for his role in Marc Forster’s Afghanistan-set The Kite Runner, has died at the age of 78.
Iran’s state news agency IRNA reported that the actor had died on November 11 after a battle with cancer.
Ershadi famously got his first big screen in Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 Cannes Palme d’Or winning film Taste of Cherry, following a chance meeting with the director when he stopped at a red light in Tehran.
He loved to recount how he heard someone tapping on his window and when he rolled it down, a man introduced himself as Kiarostami and said: “I want to make a film. Would you like to be in it?”
Born in Isfahan on March 26 1947, Ershadi was approaching his 50s at the time of this chance meeting. Having moved to Vancouver in the 1980s in the wake of the Islamic revolution, where he worked in an architectural firm for more than a decade, Ershadi had recently returned to Iran.
Following his performance in a Taste of Cherry, as a man searching for someone to bury him under a cherry tree after his planned suicide, Ershadi’s acting career took off and he would ratchet up more than 90 credits in less than three decades.
He gained international renown for his role as the father figure of Baba in Forster’s The Kite Runner about the friendship between two boys who grew up in Kabul in the 1970s and are then separated by world events.
Further international credits included Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora (2009) and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Hassan Nazer’s UK-set Utopia (2015) about a woman who travels to the UK for fertility treatment.
Back in Iran, Ershadi’s more recent films have spanned female racing driver drama Lelah; mountain village tale Mahoor and posthumous credit The Hill of Kites.
He was also rumored to have been cast in Terrence Malick’s long-awaited The Way of the Wind but this has not been confirmed.