In January 1979, the plane lifted from Tehran with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi aboard, and the monarchy he had ruled since 1941 slipped away behind him. On the tarmac, Imperial Guardsmen wept, while Shapour Bakhtiar tried to steady the country, and Ruhollah Khomeini was already poised to finish what the streets had begun. It was the end of the Peacock Throne, and the last Shah of Iran was suddenly a man in exile.

To understand that fall, go back to Tehran on 26 October 1919, where Mohammad Reza was born the eldest son of Reza Khan and Tadj ol-Molouk, and the twin brother of Ashraf. He was not born royal, because his father did not become Shah until 1925. In 1931, at the age of 11, he was sent to Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland, where an American student beat him after he demanded everyone stand to attention, a lesson in humiliation he never forgot.

He returned to Iran in 1936, trained at the military academy in Tehran, and became a Second Lieutenant in 1938. On 15 March 1939, he married Princess Fawzia of Egypt in Cairo, tying the Pahlavis to King Fuad I and King Farouk I. Then, in 1941, the Anglo-Soviet invasion forced Reza Shah to abdicate, and on 16 September Mohammad Reza was announced in parliament as the new Shah, stepping into a war-made throne.

At first he seemed cautious and unsure, but the years soon gave him harder habits. In 1953, after Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalised Iranian oil, a CIA and British-backed coup restored the Shah’s authority, and General Fazlollah Zahedi took office. From that point, Mohammad Reza stopped being a figurehead and became an effective authoritarian, centralising power while the security service SAVAK crushed dissent. He also leaned on friends such as Ernest Perron, and later on Asadollah Alam, as he learned to rule through a court as much as through law.

His grandest promises came with the White Revolution in 1963, which redistributed land, expanded education, and gave women the vote. In 1967, he took the title Shahanshah, and on 26 October 1967 Farah Diba was crowned Shahbanu beside him. The modernising drive brought new schools, dams, factories, and a fast-growing economy, but it also bred anger among clerics, students, and the educated unemployed, while the Jaleh Square killings on 8 September 1978 shattered any hope of compromise.

By 1971, the 2,500-year celebration at Persepolis had shown both his ambition and his blindness, with its tent city, fireworks, and 6,000 soldiers in ancient costumes. In the 1970s he doubled down on oil power, one-party rule under Rastakhiz, and a self-image as the architect of a Great Civilisation, while his cancer, diagnosed in 1974, quietly weakened him. When the revolution came in 1978, he hesitated, fled in January 1979, and never returned. He died in Cairo on 27 July 1980, aged 60, and was buried in the Al Rifa'i Mosque, far from the throne he had once called his destiny.