A Lesson In Patience & Persistence From Shohreh Aghdashloo

The Daily Beast’s piece about Shoreh Aghdashloo notes that she escaped Ayatollah-run Tehran in 1979. Twenty-five years later, she became the only Iranian actor ever to be nominated for an Oscar. Guess what an agent told her 20 years ago?

“You are limited,” the agent said.

“Well yes,” she’d replied in her deep, dark-velvet tones, “with an Iranian accent, jet-black hair and no experience in Hollywood, of course I am.”

Aghdashloo made some films in Iran in the ’70s, but after she left, she studied politics in England. “I was convinced that I had left my acting career behind in Tehran, but this was not to be my fate,” she says. She moved to Los Angeles, and things moved ever so slowly. She did Persian plays, a couple of art films. Then an episode of Matlock and a film called Maryam. It was years before she landed The House Of Sand And Fog, which earned her an Oscar nomination in 2004; but after that: 24, ER and a character on The Simpsons. Next she’ll play an Afghan activist who fought for women’s rights under the Taliban in SEVEN, the play opening The Daily Beast’s Women in the World summit this month. All of this despite being “limited.” As Lila Azam Zanganeh writes: “Aghdashloo became the rarest of actresses: a middle-aged Middle Eastern woman with accented English and a future in Hollywood.”