His father was Colonel Nasru'llah Minbashian, Imperial Iranian Army Band Corps.

Pahlbod studied architecture in Switzerland and in 1956 became the vice president of the Persian Fine Arts Administration in Tehran; an organisation which later became the Iranian Ministry of Culture.

Between March 1964 and January 1965 he was the deputy prime minister in the cabinet led by Hassan Ali Mansur.

The couple secretly converted to Catholic Christianity from Shia Islam in the 1950s in Egypt.

[4][5] In the years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Pahlbod lived in exile in Los Angeles where he died on 9 August 2018 at the age of 101.