Biography
French pantomime artist,
actor, author, and creator of the internationally acclaimed white-faced
clown "Bip," Marceau was awarded two Emmys, a Knighthood in the French
Legion of Honor, Officer's rank in the National Order of Merit and
comedy rank in the National Order of Arts and Letters of France. He is
the founder of the Compagnie de Mime Marcel Marceau in 1947 and Director
of Ecole de Mimodrame Marcel Marceau established in 1978.
One of the most recognized performers of the 20th century, Marceau,
whose real name was Marcel Mangel, grew up in Lille. He was the second
son of a butcher, Charles, and homemaker, Ann, who taught their sons to
cherish the family's Jewish traditions along with their father's
Socialist philosophy. From an early age, Marceau began to imitate
everything around him. "When I was five years old my mother took me to
see Charlie Chaplin's moving pictures... I sat entranced... It was then
I decided to become a mime." As a member of a summer theater group, he
longed to play the Tramp and spent long hours imitating Chaplin's walk.
He soon began imitating birds, trees, plants, animals and eventually
everyday people. Encouraged by his parents to pursue a career in
theater, he enrolled in the Lycee Fustel de Coulanges in Alsace but was
unable to complete his training due to the outbreak out of WW II.
Seeking refuge in Limoges, he studied ceramics and at age 17 won the
Masson prize for his work in enamel.
Tragedy struck when his father was seized by the Nazis and died in
Auschwitz. Marceau, in his zeal to help his fellow Jews escape the
horror of the Nazi regime, assisted his brother Alain, a leader in the
Limoges underground, in falsifying identification documents so young men
could avoid the German labor camps, citizens could get fake ration cards
and Jewish children could be safely smuggled into Switzerland. When
police raids became imminent, Marceau fled to Paris, where he was saved
from further persecution by having a cousin place him in an orphanage.
There Marceau taught dramatics and entertained the children with mime.
In his spare time, he began studying with Charles Dullin in the Sarah
Bernhardt Theater where he came under the tutelage of the master of
mime, Etienne Decroux. "He was a kind of Christ.... In his class we
dedicated our bodies to the discipline of silence." While practicing
mime to his captive audience of orphans, Decroux became Marceau's most
critical admirer, telling him "Marceau, you are a born mime."
In December 1944, Marceau joined the French Army and played in a
military base theater stationed in Germany until 1946. Returning to
Paris, he immediately began playing minor roles at the Sarah Bernhardt
Theater and became a member of The Decroux Company, where he put on his
first mimodrama "Praxitele and the Golden Fish," which won him enough
praise to launch his career.
Setting up his own company in "The Pocket Theatre," 1947, he created the
white-faced clown with the top hat (a la Chaplin) called Bip, a name he
derived from Pip in Dickens' classic "Great Expectations." His first
performance as Bip occurred on his 24th birthday in "Bip and the Street
Girl" but pantomime did not draw large audiences. In 1949 Marceau took
his company on tour to Israel and Holland and in 1951 to Berlin, but it
was not until 1952 that the performance could sell 1,200 seats in the
Sara Bernhardt Theater. In 1955 his U.S. and Canada tour, originally
scheduled for two weeks, was so successful it was extended for three
months. "When I got back to Paris after being a hit on Broadway in 1955,
everything changed for me. It was a new, almost frightening experience."
An international talent by the late '50s, Marceau gave over 18,000
performances in over 100 countries. Extending his acting ability onto
the screen, he appeared in the films "Barbarella" (1968), "Shanks,"
(1974), in which he played the leading role, "Silent Movie" (1976) and
many others. By 1979, he had made his 17th tour of the U.S. and he wrote
the novel "Pimparello" in 1987. After Marceaus' original mime company
disbanded in 1964, he formed a new company in 1978 with a subsidy from
the French government. While fluent in five languages offstage, onstage
he perfected his silent, subtle art. "The art of mime is an art of
metamorphosis. You cannot say in mime what you can say better in words.
You have to make a choice. It is the art of the essential. And you
cannot lie. You have to show the truth....Why am I popular? Because I
brought silence to the stage, because I made the invisible visible. I
create abstract worlds and make them complete."
Married three times, he had two sons with his first wife and two
daughters with the third. Marceau worked on the international stage into
his 80s. He died on September 22, 2007 in Paris at age 84.
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