Silence falls on Marcel Marceau, master of the mime

[helderheid]

Monday, September 24, 2007

By John Lichfield

When great actors die, they are said to "fall silent". The mime artist Marcel Marceau, who died at the weekend, had been delighting the world in silence for 60 years.

In Paris on Saturday, he, and his restless alter-ego "Bip", fell still. He was 84.

Marceau was perhaps the most loved and internationally admired of all French people. "Bip" – a pale, elastic-limbed clown with a striped shirt and limp red flower in his battered hat – was instantly recognisable from the United States to China.

"Bip" was inspired by the work of Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and other early film stars. He also drew on – and revived – older, European traditions of silent theatre, such as the Italian Commedia dell'arte.

Marceau once suggested another, darker, reason for his wordless art. He was born into a French Jewish family in 1923. His father, Charles Mangel, a butcher, was deported from France in 1944 and died in Auschwitz concentration camp.

"The people who came back from the camps were never able to talk about it," he once said. "My name is Mangel. I am Jewish. Perhaps that, unconsciously, contributed towards my choice of silence."

RIP.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breaking-news/world/europe/article2993672.ece