Prime Minister, Leader. Son of Mohammad Reza and Naz-Baygom and born in the Bakhtiari region of Iran. His maternal grandfather, Najaf-Gholi Samsam ol-Saltaneh, was appointed prime minister twice: in 1912 and 1918. Shapour's mother died when he was seven years old. His father was executed by Reza Shah in 1934 while Shapour was studying in Paris. He returned to Iran and remained there for two years, he then left for France in 1936, where he earned degrees in political science, philosophy and law in 1939. In the same year, Shapour married a French woman and in 1940 he volunteered for the French army and served in the "Orlean" battalion in WWII. After the war, he obtained his PH.D. in the field of political science from the Sorbonne in Paris. Shapour returned to Iran in 1946. In 1951 he was appointed by the ministry of labor, first as director of the labor department in the Province of Isfahan and later the same position in Khuzestan, center of the oil industry. In 1951 Mohammad Mosaddeq had come to power in Iran. Under his premiership Shapour was appointed deputy minister of labor in 1953. After the Shah was reinstated by a British-American sponsored coup d'état, Shapour remained a critic of his rule. In the mid-1950s he was involved in underground activity against the Shah's regime, calling for the 1954 Majlis elections to be free and fair and attempting to revive the nationalist movement. In 1960, the Second National Front was formed and Shapour played a very crucial role in the new organization's activities as the head of the student activist body of the Front. He and his colleagues differed from most other government opponents, they were very moderate, restricting their activity to peaceful protest and calling only for the restoration of democratic rights within the framework of a constitutional monarchy. Despite these moderate demands, the Shah refused to cooperate and opted to outlaw the Front and imprison the most prominent liberals. From 1964 to 1977, the imperial regime refused to permit any form of opposition activity, even from moderate liberals like Shapour. The following years he was imprisoned repeatedly, a total of six years, for his opposition to the Shah. He was also one of the prominent members of central council of the illegal Fourth National Front in late 1977, when the group was reconstituted as the Union of National Front Forces with Shapour as head of the Iran Party which was the largest group in the Front. In January 1979, Shapour was appointed prime minister. He was overthrown in less than two months by the Islamic Revolution of February 1979. Subsequently, Shapour fled to France and lived in a suburb of Paris where he formed and led the National Resistance Movement of Iran, opposed to the Islamic Republic Government.