Just outside Tehran there once stood a statue of Farah Pahlavi, the last Empress of Iran. “It was bronze, and nearly three metres high,” explains the widow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, overthrown by the Iranian Revolution in 1979. “They tried to smash it into pieces after we’d left but they couldn’t. So in the end they gave up and pushed me into a lake.” Her eyes crinkle as she breaks into a half-smile: “Anyway I like to think that one day I’ll resurface.”

It is 40 years to the day since the final curtain came down on the rule of the woman dubbed “the Jacqueline Kennedy of the Middle East” and her husband - who had been driven from their country a few weeks before. The Shah had angered clerics by trying to westernise the country and was hated by many for his autocratic reign. The Empress remembers the day of her family’s exile with mixed emotions: “I tried not to lose all hope and think that it really was the end,” she tells me. “But I will never forget the tears in the king’s eyes as the plane took off.”

Life in exile has been tough. The Shah died of cancer in Egypt just months after being forced off the throne, and over the last 18 years the Empress has lost two of her four children to suicide; in 2001, their 31-year-old daughter Princess Leila died of a drug overdose in London, and in 2011 the couple’s 44-year-old son, Prince Ali-Reza, shot himself in Boston.

According to the Empress, her children “never overcame the shock” of what had happened in their formative years.

In the discreet but opulent Paris flat where she now spends most of the year, the 80-year-old Empress is surrounded by memories of her glamorous past life. Among the paintings and sculptures are nestled photographs of the husband she still refers to as “the king” and their offspring - Crown Prince Reza (now 58 and a political activist, living in the US) and Princess Farahnaz (aged 55 and living quietly in New York), as well as Leila and Ali-Reza.