When the Shah of Iran celebrated his birthday in 1955, he summoned a homegrown superstar to sing at the palace. She was called Googoosh and she was five years old. Nearly 70 years later, Mahsa Amini, not long before she was beaten to death by Iranian morality police for not wearing a hijab, posted a video of herself singing along to a song. It was by a homegrown superstar, a singer and actress with seven million followers on Instagram: Googoosh. In the intervening years, she had both travelled the world and lived under house arrest. She was variously adored, exploited and swindled by men who, in the end, tried to silence her altogether. Today, galvanised by the Shah’s exiled son, Reza Pahlavi, Iranians are demonstrating in their thousands against the regime and there are rumours that its head, Ayatollah Khamenei, may flee the country. Amid an internet blackout, there are reports that 500 protesters have been shot dead by the regime and more than 10,000 have been arrested. “I am living day and night with a mix of of anxiety and hope,” Googoosh said at the weekend, “waiting for a change of regime to happen soon. The people are being brutally suppressed. The killing has not stopped. The situation can no longer wait.” Back in 1955, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard turned Googoosh into a symbol of resistance.

“What happened to me is the reason I want to be a voice for young people now,” she says. “They said singing was sinful and music was banned. They condemned Googoosh to a lifetime of silence, so I tried to bury her.” The woman who, before Madonna, before Beyoncé, had been one of the biggest pop stars of the 20th century, didn’t even dare sing at home, “in case a neighbour denounced me. I felt like a bird trapped in a cage, waiting for deliverance.”

Twenty years later it arrived, and Googoosh embarked on her second act.

From child star to pop icon

With her father, aged about two

GOOGOOSH/SIMON & SCHUSTER

Her extraordinary life story begins in 1950. She was born Faegheh Atashin, but nicknamed Googoosh — cuckoo — by her father. She was two when her mother left her father, who worked as a travelling performer. Under Iranian law, Googoosh had to remain with her father, so he took her to work with him, touring the country acting, singing and doing acrobatics. The first time he put his daughter on stage to sing, she had to stand on a chair because she was too small to reach the microphone. When she saw the audience, she was so nervous she wet herself. By the time she was five she’d become Iran’s first child star. At eight, she landed her first film role; at 13 it was her name in lights at a fashionable beach resort, where she was booked to perform all summer; and at 16, she was the main breadwinner, releasing the first of more than 40 hit records. She sang for Iranian royals and visiting royals, for heads of state and alongside the likes of Tina Turner and Ray Charles at music festivals around the world.

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“I became older than my age,” she says from her home in exile in Los Angeles. “I learnt from my father how to perform, how to sing and dance and act and when I was on stage, or in front of the camera, it was a dream for me. I watched Ingrid Bergman and Elizabeth Taylor and Gina Lollobrigida and I wanted to do that.”

The stage was also an escape. At home, she was bullied and physically abused by her stepmother. When she finished work late at night, her father took her to a small flat he’d rented for her to live in, to stop his wife complaining about her. He locked her in. “The only way out was marriage, so the first person who asked me to marry them, Mahmoud Ghorbani, I said yes. I was 17. I wanted a personal life, to do whatever I wanted, to talk about whatever I wanted to talk about, with nobody pushing me or slapping me or saying, ‘Don’t talk, just perform.’ ”

With the French singer Charles Aznavour in Tehran, 1969

ALAMY

The marriage, during which she caught her husband several times with other women, lasted five years. They had a son, Kambiz, now 57, who still complains that she was always away working. Ghorbani became her acting manager, but her singing was their main income. After they divorced, she sent Kambiz, then just eight, to boarding school in Switzerland for his own good.

The Burton and Taylor of the Middle East

Googoosh was a huge star in her own right, and she was also becoming romantically involved with the man who would become her second husband. Behrouz Vossoughi was an Iranian film star so famous that together, they were the Middle East’s answer to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

“I didn’t want Kambiz to be exposed to my life,” she says, “because it wasn’t a good one. There was too much gossip. We were both so famous that we had no privacy — all the newspapers and magazines wanted pictures of us.”

Her life was impossibly glamorous. She was the biggest female film star, the first woman to sing pop songs in Iran and wear miniskirts. She worked with the best songwriters and wore the finest clothes, travelling to Paris every six months to buy jewellery, accessories and couture dresses from Loris Azzaro, a famous fashion designer. Iranian women, she says, wanted to copy what she was wearing, how she was styling her hair, what clothes she wore on TV. Tehran was a modern, cosmopolitan city and Googoosh was at the heart of it.

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She married Vossoughi after three years together, but it was not a success and by the time she was 26, she was divorced for the second time. “I was willing to let go of the man I had been madly in love with,” she writes in her book, Googoosh: A Sinful Voice, “because I couldn’t handle the jealousy, the arguments, the betrayals, the disappointments.” The divorce, coming at the same time as the death of her beloved younger brother, felled her.

Googoosh’s album Fasle Tazeh, 1984

TARANEH ENTERPRISES INC

“I lost all purpose. I did everything mechanically, devoid of meaning. And that’s when Homayoun walked into my life.” Homayoun Mesdaghi was a DJ she’d known from the Tehran night scene since she was a teenager and now, they met again at a party. He was, she says,a handsome, charming drug addict, who beat her up when he was high and suggested that freebasing cocaine might help her relax. Six months after they met, they were in New York and watched the Iranian revolution happen on TV.

Suicidal thoughts

Overnight, the life she’d known in cosmopolitan Tehran came to an end. She was also at personal rock-bottom. Still devastated by the loss of her brother, she discovered that her manager had stolen all her money — and she also had a drug problem. She and Mesdaghi were living on takeaway food and staying in a cheap, filthy hotel room. Standing by an open window one rainy day, she looked down at Seventh Avenue and contemplated jumping. “It wasn’t just the drugs that made me decide to kill myself, it was one thing after another,” she says. “The only thing that kept me alive was thinking of my son. What would they tell him if I went through with this? That I’d abandoned him? That I’d selfishly killed myself after becoming a junkie?”

Instead, she called a friend, spent two weeks drying out and returned to Iran, where it was entirely possible she would be killed by the new regime. Why?

“I was dying in New York,” she says. “I decided if I’m going to die, I’ll die in my own country. If my life is going to end, I’d prefer to be in Iran.” In her book, she writes that “the pull of Iran is relentless, stronger than fear or reason, even as your homeland is caught in the throes of political turmoil, even if it means facing a firing squad. It’s that unshakeable connection with your motherland, even when it betrays you, that keeps pulling you back.”

At passport control in Tehran, the guard said she was a dead woman walking. Yet for six months, nothing happened. Then, suddenly, she was summoned for the first of many interrogations. She was accused of being a corrupting western influence and a whore. They asked the same questions again and again, about why she’d sung a particular song, or for a particular person. Singing and dancing were “sinful”. She spent a month locked up with other women, from actresses to doctors, in the notorious Evin prison, singing songs for them softly, so the guards wouldn’t hear. She didn’t know if she would ever get out. Other women were being tortured and executed. Guards called her mother to say, “Googoosh will be next.” Instead, after 28 days, they confiscated her passport, gave her a document to sign and released her.

Sporting a short haircut in the Seventies

GOOGOOSH/INSTAGRAM

“I, Faegheh Atashin, also known as Googoosh,” it read, “declare that from this day onward I will not sing or engage in any artistic endeavours, will not attend or participate in any social or political gatherings and will be for ever loyal to the principles of the great Islamic Revolution.” She was effectively under house arrest.

“I thought they would kill me,” she says. “I saw how many other women were arrested and executed. I don’t know why they didn’t. Maybe they were afraid to kill celebrities or thought the people might rise up? Googoosh was finished, so I lived an ordinary life as Faegheh.” She couldn’t leave the country, but nor did she want to — when other people were fleeing Iran, she points out, she flew back. “I wanted to be with my people. I wanted to fight with them. I thought that if I left Iran and my people, then I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the eye later on.”

A new beginning and sell-out crowds

Kambiz went to Istanbul with his father and she set about living a new life. She rented out Googoosh’s old house, found somewhere cheaper for Faegheh to live, and lived off the difference. “By April 1988,” she writes, “I was nearly 40 years old and had done nothing with my life for about a decade. Day in, day out, I killed time at home by reading, playing solitaire, listening to my son’s music on my Walkman. I cooked, cleaned, smoked cigarettes and opium. I was just waiting for deliverance.”

It was another ten years before deliverance came. The president at the time had, as she puts it, “opened some doors for actors and actresses for a brief time. We thought he was going to change everything.” Now married to a famous film director, Masoud Kimiai, he wanted to direct her in a film in Canada. Maybe she would like to do a concert there too, suggested the producers.

On stage in Toronto, July 2000, for her first concert in 21 years

REUTERS

“I was shocked,” she says. “I said, ‘I can’t do that, I’ve signed a paper saying I’m not going to sing.’ The studio said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll fix it,’ and I said, ‘If you can fix it for me to sing, then come back to Iran, OK.’ And they did.” At the age of 41, the regime returned her passport and she boarded a plane to Toronto. At every step, from check-in to boarding, she expected to be arrested. Only when the flight left Iranian airspace did she believe that she was free.

What she found when she arrived in Toronto, to her astonishment, was that even though she hadn’t sung in public for decades or released any new material, her fans had never forgotten her. Instead, as a friend once wrote to her in a letter, by staying silently in Iran she had become the loudest possible symbol of resistance. She performed to a sell-out crowd of nearly 20,000, singing loudly, in public, for the first time since she was 29. As she waited for the lights to go up, she didn’t even know if she could.

“Can you imagine the feeling I had? I was famous, then everything was gone. I had no news from anyone. I didn’t know that people still remembered me, that they were listening to my cassettes. While I was at home, playing cards, people were waiting for me, they were waiting for Googoosh. It was a dream come true.”

But it meant she spent the rest of her life in exile. After the concert, and an appearance on American TV without a headscarf, people connected to the regime told her, “Don’t come back to Iran. It would be better for you to stay away.” So she spent time living in Toronto, Paris and New York before eventually settling in LA, home to the largest Iranian population outside Iran.

Addressing a Freedom Rally for Iran in Los Angeles, October 2022

REUTERS

“This was a better life in every way,” she says. “I have all the things that they took from me, and my son and my grandchildren were here. That’s why I said OK. I will sing for the people who are still in Iran. I will sing for them here.”

Every day, she gets messages on social media from fans in Iran telling her how difficult their lives are. She is hopeful that soon — “very soon” — the regime will fall. Mass protests against the regime have recently taken place across Iran, prompting Googoosh to praise their bravery on social media and lead calls for a free Iran.

“The death of Mahsa Amini made women brave and emboldened and open to ripping everything up. Today, they can walk on the street without the hijab. I live in hope that there will be change.”

She recently announced that she would no longer perform in public until, as she put it, “my people get their freedom”. So Googoosh’s next performance, like her first, will be in a free Iran. Or, it won’t happen at all.

Googoosh: A Sinful Voice by Googoosh with Tara Dehlavi (Simon & Schuster, £20) is published on January 15. To order, go to timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK P&P on online orders over £25. Discount available for Times+ members