The man who inspired Spielberg and lived at the airport for 18 years died

A man who lived at the Charles de Gaulle airport for 18 years died in the air harbor of the French capital. It was this Iranian named Merhan Karimi Nasseri who inspired Steven Spielberg to create the film “Terminal” with Tom Hanks in the title role.

The Iranian, who lived for 18 years at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport and inspired Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film The Terminal, died Saturday at the airport, the Associated Press reported.

Merhan Karimi Nasseri died of a heart attack at the airport’s terminal 2F around noon, a Paris airport official said. According to the official, the police and medical team treated him but were unable to save him.

According to French media reports, Karimi Nasseri, allegedly born in 1945, lived in terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle airport from 1988 to 2006 – first due to legal uncertainty, and then of his own free will.

Karimi Nasseri did not have residence papers when he first arrived in France, which meant he was stuck at the airport for years.

Year after year, he slept on a red plastic bench, befriended airport workers, showered in back office, wrote in his diary, read magazines, and watched travelers pass by.

The staff nicknamed him Lord Alfred and he became a mini celebrity among the passengers.

“Eventually I will leave the airport,” he told the Associated Press in 1999, smoking a pipe on a bench, looking frail with long sparse hair, sunken eyes and sunken cheeks. “But I am still waiting for a passport or a transit visa.”

Nasseri was born to an Iranian father and a British mother. He left Iran to study in England in 1974. When he returned, he stated that he had been imprisoned for protesting against the Shah and expelled without a passport. Later investigations revealed that he was never actually expelled from Iran.

The man applied for political asylum in several European countries. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Belgium gave him a refugee card, but he said his briefcase containing the refugee card was stolen from a Paris train station.

The French police later arrested him, but could not deport him anywhere because he had no official papers. He ended up at the Charles de Gaulle airport in August 1988 – and stayed there.

Further bureaucratic clumsiness and increasingly stringent European immigration laws kept him in no man’s land for years.

When he finally received his refugee papers, Nasseri described his surprise and uncertainty about leaving the airport. He reportedly refused to sign the papers and ended up staying there for a few more years until he was hospitalized in 2006 and then lived in a Parisian orphanage.

Both France and Belgium have offered Nasseri residency over the years, but he was reportedly upset that they listed him as Iranian and not British and wanted them to address him as “Sir Alfred Mehran”.

Those who befriended him at the airport said that years of living in a windowless space took a toll on the man’s mental state. An airport doctor in the 1990s worried about his physical and mental health and said he was “petrified here”. And one ticket salesman likened him to a prisoner unable to “live outside.”

Nasseri has been living at the airport again in recent weeks, according to an administration official. The man settled in terminal 2F after several years in an orphanage in Paris.

His saga inspired The Terminal starring Tom Hanks, the French film Lost on the Road and the opera The Flight.

In The Terminal, Tom Hanks plays Victor Naworski, arriving at New York’s JFK Airport from the fictional Eastern European country of Krakozia, only to find that an overnight political revolution has had all his travel documents revoked. Victor is left in the airport’s international lounge and told that he must remain there until his status is cleared, which is dragging on as unrest in Krakozhia continues.

Spielberg’s production company paid Nasseri £210,000 for the rights to his life story.