Marcel Marceau, France’s Silent Knight, Dies At 84

MARCEL Marceau, who revived the art of mime and brought poetry to silence, has died.

Marceau, a Holocaust survivor who performed around the world, died in Paris yesterday at 84.

Former assistant Emmanuel Vacca announced the death on radio but gave no cause.

Wearing white face paint, soft shoes and a battered hat topped with a red flower, Marceau played the entire range of human emotions on stage for nearly 60 years, never uttering a word.

But offstage, he was famously chatty. "Never get a mime talking, he wont stop," he once said.

His comic and tragic sketches appealed on a universal level, with each audience interpreting his performance in its own way.

"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."

In mime, Marceau said, gestures expressed the essence of the souls most secret aspiration. "To mime the wind, one becomes a tempest. To mime a fish, you throw yourself into the sea."

Marceau created the figure of Bip, the melancholy, engaging clown with a limp red flower in his hat.

He traced his ancestry back through US silent film greats Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to the clowns of the Commedia dellArte, a centuries-old European tradition, and to the stylised gestures of Chinese opera and the Noh plays of Japan.

He was singlehandedly responsible for reviving the art of mime after World War II.

His Compagnie Marcel Marceau was the only mime troupe in the world in the 1950s and 1960s, enjoying as much acclaim abroad as it did at home.

From 1969 to 1971 he directed the Ecole Internationale de Mime before founding his Ecole Internationale de Mimodrame in Paris in 1978.

Marcel Marceau was born in the Alsatian town of Strasbourg on March 22, 1923.

He was brought up in Lille, where his father was a butcher. When World War II came, his father was taken hostage and later killed by the invading Nazis and in 1944 Marcel joined his elder brother in the Resistance. He later joined the French Army and served with occupation forces in Germany at the end of the war.

He began to study acting in 1946 under Charles Dullin and the great mime teacher Etienne Decroux, who also taught Jean-Louis Barrault.

As he aged, Marceau kept on performing at the same level, never losing the agility that made him famous.

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

On top of his Legion of Honour, he was invited to be a UN goodwill ambassador for a 2002 conference on ageing.

REUTERS, AP

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