France:He was the poet laureate of silence, a melancholy clown with a white face and striped jumper who changed modern theatre and inspired a generation of moonwalking, door-opening street performers.
Marcel Marceau, the world's most famous mime artist, has died aged 84. A French Jew who survived the Nazi occupation, Marceau was France's biggest theatrical export of the past 50 years. Yesterday, French president Nicolas Sarkozy lamented the loss of "one of France's most eminent ambassadors".
In a striped top, bell-bottom leotard and battered hat with a limp red flower, Marceau found fame with his 1947 creation, Bip. Wordless, white-faced Bip silently endured comic and tragic adventures: trying to escape from cages and glass boxes; attempting and failing suicide; taming lions; chatting up ladies at dinner parties.
"The mime Marceau will forever be the character of Bip," prime minister Francois Fillon said in a statement confirming the performer's death. "He became one of the best-known French artists in the world. His students and the showbusiness world will miss him."
Marceau described his alter ego as a Don Quixote character "fighting invisible windmills". "Mime, like music, knows neither borders nor nationalities," he once said. "If laughter and tears are the characteristics of humanity, all cultures are steeped in our discipline."
After success on the American stage and television in the mid-1950s, Marceau performed Bip internationally for decades. He led what was then the world's only mime company, directing large-scale "mimodramas" and inventing his own "grammar" of performance with over 250 positions for one hand. His work inspired numerous actors, from Gary Cooper to the magician David Copperfield. Marceau's sketch Walking Against the Windinspired Michael Jackson's moonwalk routine.
Marceau traced his ancestry back through US silent film greats Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to the clowns of the Commedia dell'Arte, a centuries-old European tradition, and to the stylised gestures of Chinese opera and the Noh plays of Japan.
Marceau was a slim, agile man whose eloquent description and explanation complemented his mute mastery of mime. In mime, Marceau said, gestures express the essence of the soul's most secret aspiration. "To mime the wind, one becomes a tempest. To mime a fish, you throw yourself into the sea."
Born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg in 1923, the son of a Jewish butcher, he fled to southwest France as a teenager when German troops invaded. Hidden with other Jewish children in safe houses, he would entertain them with acts inspired by Charlie Chaplin. His father was taken hostage by the invading Nazis and killed in Auschwitz in 1944. In that year Marcel joined his elder brother in the Resistance. He changed his name to Marceau to hide his origins. He began to study acting in 1946 under Charles Dullin and the great mime teacher Etienne Decroux. It was in Marcel Carne's famous 1947 film starring Barrault, Les Enfants du Paradis, that Marceau, who played Arlequin, became known as a mime artist. He formed his own mime company in 1948, and the troupe was soon touring other European countries. The company failed financially in 1959, but was revived as a school, the École Internationale de Mimodrame, in 1984.
Asked if the silence surrounding Holocaust survivors inspired his work, Marceau said: "The people who came back from the camps, couldn't talk about it, they didn't know how to express it . . . Maybe that has counted, subconsciously, in my choice of silence."
- (Guardian service, Reuters)
'MIME SHOWS THE SOUL': Marcel on life, art and death
The following are extracts from an interview with Marcel Marceau by Irish TimesParis Correspondent, Lara Marlowe, in January 2001:
• "Comedy and tragedy, life and death, reality and dreams, shadow and light," he tells me. "Every world has its contrary. Good and evil. This is what I try to show in my art."
• "I saw The Little Tramp[the Charlie Chaplin film] as a child, and that's when I knew I wanted to be a mime A mime shows the soul inside man; that's why Chaplin was so important to me. When he did films like The Little Tramp, he was all mankind."
• On meeting Chaplin by chance at Orly airport in 1967, when Chaplin, his wife Oona and several of their nine children were in the airport café: "Chaplin said, 'Hello, Marcel Marceau. I have seen all your posters in Paris. Children, come and meet Marcel Marceau'." Marceau has recounted the meeting hundreds of times, but he still relishes the telling. "I said, 'You know Mr Chaplin, you are a God to me.' I started walking like the Little Tramp and he mimicked me mimicking him. I was 44 then; he was 78, but still good looking with his white hair. Oona said, 'Charlie, we have to go to Vevey'. I felt I would never see him again and I took his hand and kissed it and wouldn't let go of it. He had tears in his eyes."
• Nothing enrages Marceau more than to hear it said that mime is old-fashioned: "Nothing is old-fashioned, but many things pass because the tradition is not kept," he says. "Kabuki and No, and the Indian Mahabarata are 500 years old and nobody says it's old-fashioned. An art form is not a fad. But we have to be very careful to keep the power of the classical form which is beyond time."
• "Irish theatre audiences are wonderful. At the end of my first show at the Gaiety, someone shouted, 'Can you speak?' and I said, 'Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. It touches my heart'."
• Had it not been for the second World War, he might never have become a mime: "We lived in silence. Everything was compartmentalised. Speaking was dangerous. It was like the Foreign Legion, where no one knows your true identity."
• "Family is not important to me," he says. "I had no time to be a family father. If I had, I would have stayed in the same town . . . We are all like gypsies; I have spent more time in the sky than on the ground. I am like Ulysses."
• "What would make me sad? If in my lifetime I was forgotten . . . I wanted to make [mime] an art form on the level of theatre or opera."
• "Bip is a Don Quixote fighting windmills."
• "I will die," he announces, as if his mortality were in doubt. "Maybe, one day, debout, like a tree." His arm slams on to the table with the dead weight of a body falling on to the stage.