Before their release, the women were last heard of on 31 December when a video was posted online showing them dressed in black robes and headscarves and urging the Italian government to do everything it could to bring them home.
Staunton drew upon her mother (and the women she'd see "in headscarves standing at bus stops in the dark waiting to go to work") when she devised, with director Mike Leigh, her 2004 film breakthrough role as Vera Drake, a downtrodden cleaning lady who performs illegal abortions in 1950s London.
In the latter, Julie Christie's Chelsea outfits – mini-skirts, headscarves, caps and knee socks – stood out.
As the past few minutes of people-watching on this bench have revealed, a few of them tidy up their headscarves as they approach the morality police unit, only to have them almost immediately slide back again.
In Tehran's luxurious Grand Azadi hotel, a row of women dressed in black with red headscarves hold the lines open to bidders as the auctioneer tries to conjure up increasingly large sums with his hammer.
And just as we don't ban headscarves, nor do we seek to exclude all traces of religiosity from the classroom.
Since Rouhani, headscarves remain off inside cars for some; others simply neglect to put their scarves back on when they fall off in public spaces.
All are available to anyone wanting to reduce their chemical intake – and require zero reliance on stinky headscarves.
Consider how the United Kingdom Independence Party, a populist outfit that wants much tighter curbs on foreigners, has played down issues of ethnicity or religion as it rises in the polls, recently ditching calls to ban Muslim headscarves.
The country has successfully pushed back a jihadist incursion into Mali, and carried out air strikes on IS targets in Iraq.Moreover, France is unapologetic about its secular rules, including its 2004 ban on wearing Muslim headscarves or other religious symbols in public institutions, as well as its criminalisation of hate speech and anti-Semitism.
The state keeps officialdom and religion firmly apart, and Mr Chirac has banned Muslim headscarves (as well as "conspicuous" crucifixes) in state schools.
