Marcel Marceau

Marcel Marceau (born Marcel Mangel; 22 March 1923 – 22 September 2007) was a French mime artist and actor most famous for his stage persona, "Bip the Clown".

He referred to mime as the "art of silence", performing professionally worldwide for more than 60 years.

As a Jewish youth, he lived in hiding and worked with the French Resistance during most of World War II, giving his first major performance to 3,000 troops after the liberation of Paris in August.

Following the war, he studied dramatic art and mime in Paris.

Marcel Marceau was born in Strasbourg, France, to a Jewish family.

His father, Charles Mangel, was a kosher butcher originally from Będzin, Poland.

His mother, Anne Werzberg, came from Yabluniv, present-day Ukraine.

Through his mother's family, he was a cousin of Israeli singer Yardena Arazi.

When Marcel was four years old, the family moved to Lille, but they later returned to Strasbourg.

After France's invasion by Nazi Germany, Marcel, then 17, fled with his family to Limoges.

His cousin Georges Loinger, one of the members of the French Jewish Resistance in France (Organisation Juive de Combat-OJC, aka Armée Juive), urged him to join in order to help rescue Jews during the Holocaust.

The OJC, which was composed of nine clandestine Jewish networks, rescued thousands of Jewish children and adults during the war in France.

He was schooled in the Paris suburbs at the home of Yvonne Hagnauer, while pretending to be a worker at the school she directed; Hagnauer would later receive the honor of Righteous Among the Nations from Yad Vashem.

In 1944 Marcel's father was captured by the Gestapo and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was killed.

Marcel's mother survived.

Marcel and his older brother, Alain, adopted the last name "Marceau" during the German occupation of France; the name was chosen as a reference to François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers, a general of the French Revolution.

The two brothers joined the French Resistance in Limoges.

They rescued numerous children from the race laws and concentration camps in the framework of the Jewish Resistance in France, and, after the liberation of Paris, joined the French army.

Owing to Marceau's fluency in English, French, and German, he worked as a liaison officer with General George Patton's Third Army.

According to Marceau, when he was five years of age, his mother took him to see a Charlie Chaplin film, which entranced him and led him to want to become a mime artist.

The first time he used mime was after France was invaded, in order to keep Jewish children quiet while he helped them escape to neutral Switzerland.

After the war ended in 1945, he enrolled as a student in Charles Dullin's School of Dramatic Art in the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Paris, where he studied with teachers such as Joshua Smith and Étienne Decroux and Jean-Louis Barrault.

Marceau joined Jean-Louis Barrault's company and was soon cast in the role of Arlequin in a pantomime, Baptiste (which Barrault had interpreted in the film Les Enfants du Paradis).

Marceau's performance won him such acclaim that he was encouraged to present his first "mimodrama", Praxitele and the Golden Fish, at the Bernhardt Theatre that same year.

The acclaim was unanimous, and Marceau's career as a mime artist was firmly established.

In 1947 Marceau created Bip the Clown, whom he first played at the Théâtre de Poche (Pocket Theatre) in Paris.

In his appearance, he wore a striped pullover and a battered, be-flowered silk opera hat.

The outfit signified life's fragility, and Bip became his alter ego, just as the "Little Tramp" had become Charlie Chaplin's. Bip's misadventures with everything from butterflies to lions, from ships and trains to dancehalls and restaurants, were limitless.

As a stylist of pantomime, Marceau was acknowledged without peer.

Marceau, during a televised talk with Todd Farley, expresses his respect for the mime techniques that Charlie Chaplin used in his films, noting that Chaplin seemed to be the only silent film actor who used mime.

His silent mimed exercises, which included The Cage, Walking Against the Wind, The Mask Maker, and In The Park, all became classic displays.

Satires on everything from sculptors to matadors were described as works of genius.

Of his summation of the ages of man in the famous Youth, Maturity, Old Age and Death, one critic said: "He accomplishes in less than two minutes what most novelists cannot do in volumes."

In 1949, following his receipt of the Deburau Prize (established as a memorial to the 19th-century mime master Jean-Gaspard Deburau) for his second mimodrama, Death before Dawn, Marceau founded Compagnie de Mime Marcel Marceau, the only company of pantomime in the world at the time.

The ensemble played the leading Paris theatres, such as Le Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Le Théâtre de la Renaissance, and the Bernhardt Theatre, as well as other playhouses throughout the world.

From 1959 to 1960, a retrospective of his mimodramas, including The Overcoat by Gogol, ran for a full year at the Amibigu Théâtre in Paris.

He produced 15 other mimodramas, including Pierrot de Montmartre, The Three Wigs, The Pawn Shop, 14 July, The Wolf of Tsu Ku Mi, Paris Cries — Paris Laughs and Don Juan (adapted from the Spanish writer Tirso de Molina).

Marceau performed all over the world to spread the "art of silence" (L'art du silence).

During an interview with CBS in 1987, Marceau tried to explain some of his inner feelings while creating mime, calling it the "art of silence:"

"The art of silence speaks to the soul, like music, making comedy, tragedy, and romance, involving you and your life. . . . creating character and space, by making a whole show on stage – showing our lives, our dreams, our expectations."