Homayoun Ershadi, a middle-aged Iranian architect who unexpectedly became a world-renowned actor as the star of an arty, philosophical drama, “Taste of Cherry,” and as a supporting actor in the international hit movie “The Kite Runner,” died on Tuesday. He was 78.
The cause was cancer, his sister told The Islamic Republic News Agency. She did not say where he died.
Mr. Ershadi proved able to incarnate a variety of different cinematic characters. In “Taste of Cherry” (1997), he was a brooding loner on the brink of suicide. In “The Kite Runner” (2007), he was a debonair businessman who becomes a humbled exile.
Yet the origins of his second career lay tellingly not in his abilities so much as in his mien. His sunken but piercing black eyes suggested an inner dignity that had not entirely overcome world weariness. He repeatedly played characters who were delicate and wounded, with a brutal streak reserved for self-loathing or the preservation of decency.
It was some hint of these qualities that drew Abbas Kiarostami, Iran’s most acclaimed filmmaker, over to a white Range Rover one afternoon in Tehran in the mid-1990s. Mr. Ershadi was inside, waiting at a red light, lost in thought. He was startled by a tapping sound.
He rolled down his window. Mr. Kiarostami introduced himself and asked if Mr. Ershadi would like to be in one of his movies. Mr. Ershadi replied that it would be an honor.
In an interview about a decade later with L.A. Weekly, Mr. Kiarostami described Mr. Ershadi’s “presence” as “truthful.”
Early on, Mr. Ershadi warned Mr. Kiarostami that he might ruin his film. Mr. Kiarostami replied that any problems with the film would be Mr. Kiarostami’s own fault. Mr. Ershadi felt a surge of confidence, he later recalled to eFilmCritic.
Mr. Ershadi played Mr. Badii, who roams Tehran searching for someone who will accept a large sum of money to bury him after he deliberately overdoses on sleeping pills. Mr. Badii tries to persuade a nervous Kurdish soldier, a logic-chopping Afghan seminarian and a soulful museum taxidermist.
At the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, the film prompted standing ovations and became the first Iranian movie to win the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize. In 2012, several critics and directors ranked it as one of the best movies ever made in the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound poll.
Writing in The New Yorker, the critic Sarah Kerr was one of several people to lament the film’s “sometimes ponderous existentialism,” but she also described “Taste of Cherry” as “a collection of small, scattered miracles.”
Mr. Ershadi appears in every scene, many of which consist of him silently driving. His demeanor — nothing more, nothing less — is the core of the movie.
This personal magnetism became the subject of a short story by the writer Nicole Krauss published in The New Yorker in 2018. Ms. Krauss’s narrator observes that, since “Taste of Cherry” reveals nothing biographically about its main character, “everything we know about the depth contained within him we get from his face, which also tells us about the depth contained within the actor Homayoun Ershadi.”
The narrator and a friend both become enthralled by Mr. Ershadi, having mysterious unconfirmed encounters with him and seeking to wrest lessons from the strange experiences.
On the strength of “Taste of Cherry,” Mr. Ershadi was cast in “The Kite Runner.” The movie, directed by Marc Forster, was inspired by a novel of the same name by Khaled Hosseini, which spent months on the New York Times best-seller list. Soon after Mr. Ershadi himself read it, in a two-day blaze, he got a call from a casting agent asking if he would like to appear in a film adaptation.
The movie, like the novel, concerns the childhood of an Afghan boy before the Soviet invasion; the escape by him and his father to the United States; and the boy’s return, as an adult, to an Afghanistan run by the Taliban.
The film was derided by some, including Manohla Dargis of The Times, as clichéd and predictable. Nevertheless, “The Kite Runner” moved many viewers and grossed more than $75 million worldwide. Mr. Ershadi’s performance as the protagonist’s father, Baba, was widely praised, including by Ms. Dargis.
Screen Daily’s critic Tim Grierson wrote that the film’s “strongest performance comes from Ershadi, who plays Baba with such simple decency that he becomes a towering patriarchal figure akin to Gregory Peck in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’”
Mr. Ershadi initially tried to persuade Mr. Forster not to cast him, explaining that he was a foot shorter than the Baba character in the novel. Mr. Forster insisted.
“I realized maybe he saw 6-foot-8 in my eyes,” Mr. Ershadi told The Globe and Mail.
“A lot of actors rely on their technique,” Mr. Forster explained to The Los Angeles Times, “and he only relies on his heart.”
Homayoun Ershadi was born on March 26, 1947, in Isfahan, an old city in central Iran. His father worked for the army. Mr. Ershadi earned a degree in architecture at the University of Venice. He practiced in Iran until after the Iranian Revolution, when he and his family moved to Vancouver.
In the early 1990s, Mr. Ershadi and his wife divorced, and he returned to Iran. In later years, he ran an art gallery in Tehran with his sister and brother. He often returned to Canada to see his two children and his grandchildren. Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available.
His other film credits include “Agora” (2009) and “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012).
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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