Paris – Marcel Marceau, the great French mime who for seven decades mastered silence and brought new life to an ancient art form, has died. He was 84.
Marceau died Saturday, French news media reported. The cause of death was not disclosed.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon praised Marceau on Sunday as “the master,” saying he had the rare gift of “being able to communicate with each and every one beyond the barriers of language.”
Mar ceau toured the world for more than half a century in more than 15,000 shows.
Annette Bercut Lust, author of “From the Greek Mimes to Marcel Marceau and Beyond,” said that Marceau’s mentor, French mime master Etienne Decroux, “reinvented the art of mime to revive modern theater and the actor’s art” whereas Marceau “popularized that art and brought it to the whole world.”
Starting as a child mimic of Charlie Chaplin, Marceau, by the age of 30, had become the single person to embody mime.
One of the secrets of his success, some critics said, was Marceau’s ability to incorporate cinematic techniques into his stories. He could, as former Los Angeles Times critic Dan Sullivan wrote, present a montage of fleeting moments defining a character’s “age, sex, class, even clothing” that audiences who’d been raised seeing the movies could easily follow.
Marceau created adventures for his character Bip, the dreamy poet, whose white face, ill-fitting striped shirt, too-long pants and smashed hat topped with a jaunty red carnation are perhaps the most familiar image of mime today.
To be a mime, Marceau noted, one must be a sculptor, a painter, a writer, a poet and a musician. And one must have incredible physical stamina.
“It’s not dance,” he said. “It’s not slapstick. It is essence and restraint.”
Marceau dedicated himself to being the muse for those who would follow him, including students at L’Ecole Internationale de Mimodrame de Paris that he opened in 1978.
Marceau appeared in numerous films, most famously Mel Brooks’ “Silent Movie,” where as a joke he spoke the only word in the script: “No.”
Marcel Mangel, whose father was a kosher butcher, was born March 22, 1923, in Strasbourg, near the German border. When the Germans invaded France during World War II, Marceau’s father was taken to Auschwitz, where he died in 1944. Marceau was 21.
Marcel and older brother Alain changed the family name to Marceau and joined the French underground.
He joined the Free French Forces, fighting alongside U.S. troops under Gen. George Patton.
It was before 3,000 of Patton’s soldiers that Marceau gave his first major performance, which was favorably reviewed by Stars and Stripes.
“I was good at it,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1973. “And then it began to possess me.”
By age 80, Marceau had cut back his traveling schedule from 300 performances a year to a mere 150. His wordless routines continued to captivate audiences wherever he went.
