What followed in Iran was little short of a cultural earthquake. "It was a catastrophe," she remembers, her head dropping into her hands. "I don't know exactly how many tens of millions of people typed my name into Google the next day, I don't want to know …" A taboo of unimaginable proportions had been shattered, and not by some publicity-hungry provocateur, but by the most loved and admired actor in the country. Farahani may have only been another 29-year-old hopeful in France, but in Iran she became a star the moment she appeared in Dariush Mehrjui's The Pear Tree at 14. Eighteen films later there is more than a little of Garbo, Jeanne Moreau and Irene Papas about her: a rare beauty and intelligence married to a burning emotional honesty in a country where truth of any kind is hard to come by.
In M for Mother she seared herself into the national consciousness playing a pregnant woman gassed during the Iran-Iraq war, abandoned by her husband and now carrying "a gift from God" in her womb. Both rural and urban Iran embraced her as their down-to-earth hero: Golshifteh, the star without airs. Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis who directed her in Chicken with Plums, says: "She was not just Iran, she was the mother of Iran."
The day the video was posted, when what she calls the "fire" started, the official Fars news agency in Tehran issued a communique lacerating her, saying that the pictures showed the "hidden, disgusting face of cinema". This kind of opprobrium had never before been poured on an artist, however much they had upset the regime. Her exile was now a banishment.
Farahani had already been banned from working by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance for not wearing a headscarf at the New York premiere of Ridley Scott's CIA thriller Body of Lies, where, playing opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, she became the first Iranian actress to appear in a Hollywood film since the 1979 revolution.