Ever since her marriage in 2014 to the son of a powerful Iranian hard-liner, Mahnaz Afshar, an actress with an uncanny resemblance to 1970s mini-skirted idol Googoosh, has been a figure of controversy in Iran. The recent debate is related to her appearance in November as one of the judges on the show “Persia's Got Talent,” broadcast on a Saudi-funded TV channel — right at the height of political tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Afshar played her first role in a TV series in 1998 and appeared in commercial popular films for a decade. In the late 2000s, she was seen in more artistic films and received the award for best supporting actress at Iran’s Fajr International Film Festival in 2010 and 2011, both for her role in “Saadat Abad” (“Felicity Land”), a social drama.

What made her a controversial figure was not her career but her marriage in 2014 to Yasin Ramin, the son of a staunch enemy of pro-West political activists and Reformists. Her father-in-law, Mohammad-Ali Ramin, was a high-profile official and later vice minister for the press in the Ministry of Culture during the second term of hard-line Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency. Ramin — not excited about his son’s marriage to an actress — was directly involved in the closure of many local newspapers in Iran. The period was known as one of the worst times in Iran’s press history after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. 

Afshar declared that she had voted for Reformist-backed President Hassan Rouhani in 2013, so her marriage to the son of the conservative official did not go unnoticed. Though Afshar continued to support liberal causes, such as political prisoners, the media has repeatedly called her a “hypocrite” for sleeping with the enemy.