Jonathan Lambert was one of the great theatrical mimes of his generation, in the tradition of Marcel Marceau, who was his mentor, friend and colleague.
While his career was largely based in France for the last 20 years, the unique tradition of mime he represented has continued to be an influence in his native country, notably among such theatre practitioners as Niall Henry and the Blue Raincoat Theatre Company.
Jonathan Lambert's career really took off when he moved to France to enrol in Marcel Marceau's mime school in Paris, in the late 1970s. A meeting with Marceau, who was in Dublin for a performance, made the 19-year-old aware of the school, where he was to spend the next three years. Of the 90 students that enrolled with him, only 30 survived the three years of arduous training, and of that 30, only seven graduated, including Jonathan Lambert.
While a student, he set up an Irish mime troop with two other Irish men who had also attended the Marceau school - Conal Kearney and Vincent O'Neill. Together they put on a show at the Peacock theatre, during the 1980 Dublin Theatre Festival. The show was a great success and the young men received the Best Young Players of the Year award.
However, rather than stay in Ireland after his success, Jonathan Lambert decided to return to France to pursue his career and commitments there.
Those commitments included continuing work with Marcel Marceau, who described Jonathan Lambert as one of the best students ever to pass through his school. He, along with five other students, were the first Irish mimes to study at the school when it opened in 1978.
After graduation, together with Marceau, he toured extensively during the early 1980s, performing in England, the US, Australia and New Zealand, among other countries. However, as Marceau pointed out, Jonathan Lambert was an initiator in his own right, and soon left Marceau's troop to pursue his own creative work in France.
That work included further mime work, but also comic writing and television writing for, among other programmes, the French version of Candid Camera. His excellent command of the French language enabled him to express his sense of humour through the written word and equally through his first love, the physical expression of mime. He also taught mime at different times during his professional life.
Of that first love, mime, Marceau has noted that Jonathan Lambert was greatly influenced by the comic style of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Much of his work seems to have sprung from humour. To those who knew him, that attitude was as much part of his natural personality as it was of his stage persona and playing style. He was well-known as a practical joker.
Marceau himself has spoken of how the tragic was not something that ever really interested Jonathan Lambert in his work.
Some comic sketches, devised by Jonathan Lambert were at times performed by Marceau in his own stage work.
For example, in Marceau's appearance at the Olympia Theatre last February, Jonathan Lambert devised a number of the sketches presented.
Coincidentally, it was in the Olympia Theatre that Jonathan Lambert and Marceau first met back in the 1970s.
From early in life, he was exposed to the stylised theatrical tradition of the Lambert Puppet Theatre: he is one of 10 children of the well-known puppeteer Eugene Lambert and his wife Mai.
Irish audiences of Wanderly Wagon will remember his work through his portrayal of Crow, the puppet bird with the distinctive voice and personality that charmed a generation of children and adults alike.
Jonathan Pius Lambert was born in Dublin on October 16th, 1958. Before his training at the Marcel Marceau school, he attended national school in Finglas, prior to attending secondary school at St Laurences, Cabinteely.
He is survived by his children Kealan and Charlotte, his former wife Emmanuelle Lamy, his parents Eugene and Mai, sisters Judy, Miriam and Paula, brothers Gene, Stephen, David, Noel, Liam and Conor, and his partner Ann-Mary Sagaire.
Jonathan Lambert: born 1958; died, December 2001