Mehrdad Pahlbod
Mehrdad Pahlbod was an Iranian royal and politician who served as the first culture minister of Persia from 1964 until the 1978.
Mehrdad Pahlbod, born as Ezatollah Minbashian, was also the second husband of Princess Shams Pahlavi. The couple secretly converted to Catholic Christianity from shia Islam in the 1950s in Egypt.
Pahlbod was born in Tehran into the musical family of Minbashian. His father Gholam-Hossein Minbashian, a professional violinist was the conductor of Tehran City Hall 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.
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.
