Marcel Marceau dies at 84

Grand master of mime, Marcel Marceau, dies
Last Updated: Sunday, September 23, 2007 | 10:05 AM ET
The Associated Press

Marcel Marceau, the Frenchman who revived the art of mime and brought
poetry to silence, has died, media reported Sunday. He was 84.


France-Info radio and LCI television said the family had announced
that Marceau died on Saturday evening. No other details were
released.


Wearing white face paint, soft shoes and a battered hat topped with a
red flower, the world-famous Marceau played the entire range of human
emotions onstage for more than 50 years, never uttering a word.


Offstage, he was famously chatty. "Never get a mime talking. He won't
stop," he once said.


"He was able to captivate people," mime artist Corinne Soum-Wasson, a
friend of Marceau's, told BBC News.


"I was lucky enough to have known him very well. I was teaching at
his
school in Paris, and he was just a generally funny, nice human
being."


A Jew, Marceau survived the Holocaust and also worked with the French
Resistance to protect Jewish children.


His biggest inspiration was Charlie Chaplin. Marceau, in turn,
inspired countless young performers - Michael Jackson borrowed his
famous moonwalk from a Marceau sketch, Walking Against the Wind.


Marceau performed tirelessly around the world until late in life,
never losing his agility, never going out of style. In one of his
most
poignant and philosophical acts, Youth, Maturity, Old Age, Death, he
wordlessly showed the passing of an entire life in just minutes.


"Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?"
he once said.


Marceau was born Marcel Mangel on March 22, 1923, in Strasbourg,
France. His father, Charles, a butcher who sang baritone, introduced
his son to the world of music and theatre at an early age. The boy
adored the silent film stars of the era: Chaplin, Buster Keaton and
the Marx brothers.


Active in the French Resistance


When the Germans marched into eastern France, he and his family were
given just hours to pack their bags. He fled to southwest France and
changed his last name to Marceau to hide his Jewish origins.


With his brother Alain, Marceau became active in the French
Resistance. Marceau altered children's identity cards, changing their
birth dates to trick the Germans into thinking they were too young to
be deported. Because he spoke English, he was recruited to be a
liaison officer with U.S. army Gen. George S. Patton's troops.


In 1944, Marceau's father was sent to the German Nazi concentration
camp Auschwitz, where he died.


Later, Marceau reflected on his father's death: "Yes, I cried for
him."


But he also thought of all the others killed: "Among those kids was
maybe an Einstein, a Mozart, somebody who [would have] found a cancer
drug," he told reporters in 2000. "That is why we have a great
responsibility. Let us love one another."


'Alone in a fragile world filled with injustice and beauty.'-
Marcel Marceau's description of his character, Bip


When Paris was liberated, Marcel's life as a performer began. He
enrolled in Charles Dullin's School of Dramatic Art, studying with
the
renowned mime Étienne Decroux.


On a tiny stage at the Théâtre de Poche, a smoke-filled Left Bank
cabaret, he sought to perfect the style of mime that would become his
trademark.


Bip - Marceau's on-stage persona - was born.


Marceau once said that Bip was his creator's alter ego, a sad-faced
double whose eyes lit up with child-like wonder as he discovered the
world. Bip was a direct descendant of the 19th century harlequin, but
his clownish gestures, Marceau said, were inspired by Chaplin and
Keaton.
Modern-day Don Quixote


Marceau likened his character to a modern-day Don Quixote, "alone in
a
fragile world filled with injustice and beauty."


Dressed in a white sailor suit, a top hat - a red rose perched on top
- Bip chased butterflies and flirted at cocktail parties. He went to
war and ran a matrimonial service.


In one famous sketch, Public Garden, Marceau played all the
characters
in a park, from little boys playing ball to old women with knitting
needles.


In 1949 Marceau's newly formed mime troupe was the only one of its
kind in Europe. But it was only after a hugely successful tour across
the United States in the mid-1950s that Marceau received the acclaim
that would make him an international star.


Single-handedly, Marceau revived the art of mime.


"I have a feeling that I did for mime what [Andres] Segovia did for
the guitar, what [Pablo] Casals did for the cello," he once told the
Associated Press in an interview.


In the past decades, he has taken Bip to from Mexico to China to
Australia. He has also made film appearances. The most famous was Mel
Brooks' Silent Movie: He had the only speaking line, "Non!"


As he aged, Marceau kept on performing at the same level, never
losing
the agility that made him famous. On top of his Legion of Honour and
his countless honorary degrees, he was invited to be a United Nations
goodwill ambassador for a 2002 conference on aging.


"If you stop at all when you are 70 or 80, you cannot go on," he told
in an interview in 2003. "You have to keep working."


Funeral arrangements were not immediately known.


--

On Sun, 23 Sep 2007 14:44:19 -0000, Richard Carnahan
<rfcsac627n.DeleteThis@aol.com> wrote:

>Grand master of mime, Marcel Marceau, dies
>Last Updated: Sunday, September 23, 2007 | 10:05 AM ET
>The Associated Press
>
>Marcel Marceau, the Frenchman who revived the art of mime and brought
>poetry to silence, has died, media reported Sunday. He was 84.

Another great one silenced.