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Marcel Marceau was born in Strasbourg, France, on March 22, 1923, to a Jewish family. His father, Charles, was a butcher and his mother, Ann, nee Werzberg, was a native Alsatian. Later the family moved to Lille where his father also raised pigeons on the roof. After France's invasion by Nazi Germany, Mangel, 16, fled with his family to Limoges.
Marceau entered the Lycee Fustel de Coulanges. But he was unable to complete his training. In 1940, just ahead of the German invaders, he sought refuge in Limoges. There he studied ceramics. He also studied oratory with Dorsanne.
After the war ended in 1945, he enrolled as a student in Charles Dullin's School of Dramatic Art in the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Paris, where he studied with teachers such as Joshua Smith and Étienne Decroux and Jean-Louis Barrault.
Encouraged by his parents, Marceau turned to a career in the theater. The war brought a personal tragedy. His father was seized by the Germans and died in Auschwitz. Marcel joined his brother in the resistance movement; his activities consisted of making fake ration cards and smuggling children into Switzerland. When the police began to close in, Marceau fled to Paris where a cousin saved him by placing him in the Maison d'Enfants de Sevres, an orphanage. There Marceau taught dramatics. In his spare time he also began studying with Charles Dullin in the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre. He interrupted his studies in December, 1944, to join the French army. In Germany he played in a military theater before troops until he was demobilized in 1946.
Marceau joined Jean-Louis Barrault's company and was soon cast in the role of Arlequin in the pantomime, Baptiste. Marceau's performance won him such acclaim that he was encouraged to present his first "mimodrama", Praxitele and the Golden Fish, at the Bernhardt Theatre that same year. The acclaim was unanimous and Marceau's career as a mime was firmly established.
In 1947 Marceau set up his own company at the Theatre de Poche (Pocket Theatre), a tiny hall with only 80 seats. Here he created his own whitefaced clown, Bip, a name he derived from the youngster Pip in Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations. Bip's costume consisted of a broken top hat with a red flower and striped pull-over middy to symbolize the gaiety of Paris streets and white pants. Bip first appeared on Marceau's 24th birthday in "Bip and the Street Girl." Pantomime did not attract large audiences at first, and he had to perform in cabarets to earn enough to live on until he won success in 1952 with "Pierrot of Montmartre" in the 1, 200 seat Sarah Bernhardt Theatre. By this time Marceau had attained fame beyond the confines of Paris and France. In 1949 his company toured Israel and Holland, in 1951 it played in Berlin, in 1955 the United States and Canada. Beginning in New York, the tour - originally scheduled for two weeks - lasted three months. This enabled him to become famous not just in Europe, but throughout the world.
Marceau also found himself involved in other media. Television offered him vast audiences; he showed himself to be articulate when he was interviewed. He appeared in six feature films, among them Barbarella (1968), Shanks (1974), in which he played the leading role, and Silent Movie. He also wrote a novel, Pimparello.
Marceau truly became a worldwide figure, eventually giving 18, 000 performances in over a hundred countries. Marceau's original mime company disbanded in 1964, but in the 1980s a subsidy from the French government enabled him to form a new company, with graduates from his Paris mime school. The latter was founded in 1978, and instructed students in the art of mime. Among the often-sophisticated plots Marceau used in his performances were adaptations of Gogol's The Overcoat and Kafka's The Trial.
In 2000, Marceau brought his full mime company to New York City for presentation of his new mimodrama, The Bowler Hat, previously seen in Paris, London, Tokyo, Taipei, Caracas, Santo Domingo, Valencia (Venezuela) and Munich. From 1999, when Marceau returned with his classic solo show to New York and San Francisco after 15-year absences for critically acclaimed sold-out runs, his career in America enjoyed a remarkable renaissance with strong appeal to a third generation.
In 2005 he retired from performing. Marceau died at the racetrack in Cahors, France, on 22 September 2007 at the age of 84.
Marcel Marceau is acknowledged as the world's greatest practitioner of pantomime, famous for his stage persona as "Bip the Clown". He performed professionally worldwide for over 60 years, revived pantomime of acting and created a new school to train young people who aspired to follow his style, International School of Mimodrame of Paris.
Quotations: "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. "
Marceau was an elected member of the Academy of Fine Arts Berlin, the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, the Academie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France.
Marceau was married three times: first to Huguette Mallet, with whom he had two sons, Michel and Baptiste; then, to Ella Jaroszewicz, with whom he had no children. His third wife was Anne Sicco, with whom he had two daughters, Camille and Aurelia.
