Marcel Marceau:Occasionally in the arts, there emerge individuals of whom one can say with absolute certainty, he or she was the greatest a century has produced.
In the field of mime, Marcel Marceau, who has died aged 84, was such an artist. The measure of his achievement is seen in the fact that while mime became immensely popular when he performed it, in the hands of others it remained only a minority interest, albeit a growing one.
Who else could regularly fill London's Sadler's Wells or the Old Vic for four weeks with a solo mime performance?
Before Marceau, eminent performers such as Etienne Decroux and Jean-Louis Barrault, had researched the art and delivered suitably esoteric presentations, but it was Marceau who devoted himself to years of solo performances, touring the world many times, playing in more than 80 countries. He was particularly popular in the United States, China and Japan and set himself a gruelling average of 300 performances a year. Marceau was a master of theatrical illusion.
In seconds, he could create an entire scene on an empty stage, transforming his body to suggest an array of vivid characters. At his best, he worked with such precision that the effect was breathtaking. And beneath the glittering technical virtuosity was a poetic quality that made his short compositions seem to hit deeper truths.
One of the earliest influences on Marceau's work was the silent cinema. As a boy, he was fond of dressing up in his father's trousers and painting on a black moustache to do Charlie Chaplin impersonations for his playmates. Chaplin - along with Buster Keaton - remained his idol. "I want to achieve in the 20th-century theatre what Chaplin has done in films," he once said.
He was born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, France, the son of a Jewish butcher who introduced him to music and the theatre. With the German occupation of eastern France, the family were forced to leave; he fled to the Dordogne in southwest France.There, he and his brother Alain joined the resistance, during which time he adopted the name Marceau after one of Napoleon's generals.
The brothers helped Jewish children to escape to neutral Switzerland by changing the date of birth on their identity cards to trick the Germans into believing they were too young to be deported. After the 1944 Normandy landings, he served as an interpreter with the US army in France. His father died in Auschwitz.
After the war, Marceau went to Paris to study with the great director, Charles Dullin, at his school of dramatic art. Indeed, his initial aim was to be a conventional actor.
He was lucky to work with the very best people of the time and it was at Dullin's school that he met Decroux, who taught him a vocabulary of mime technique that he was quick to extend in his own special way. Then, in 1946, he spent a short time with the Renault-Barrault company and made his first stage appearance, being praised as Arlequin in the mime play Baptiste. This had been adapted from the film Les Enfants du Paradise (1945), in which Barrault starred.
It was through the character of Bip, who made his first appearance in the tiny Theatre de Poche in 1947, that Marceau's mime technique came most vividly alive, blending humour and pathos. Here, he departed from the classicism of Decroux to revive the more romantic spirit of Jean-Gaspard Deburau and the 19th-century Pierrots.
Bip's white face beneath the battered top hat, with its red flower sticking out, became a trademark for Marceau's work. Marceau saw Bip, who was adapted from the character of Pip in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, as a kind of modern Everyman, a figure who existed half in a dream world, half in reality; he was a free spirit, "who can sometimes win but is most often beaten down".
Marceau wrote in The Story of Bip (1976): "Born in the imagination of my childhood, Bip is a romantic and burlesque hero of our time. His look is turned not only towards heaven, but into the hearts of men." Examples of Marceau's Bip performances include Bip Travels by Train, Bip Commits Suicide and Bip Hunts Butterflies.
Marceau went on to create many mimodramas, as he called them, that he performed with companies of his own, starting in 1949. The Overcoat (1951), adapted from a Gogol story, was the most accomplished, but often the form looked stilted and artificial, suffering from the lack of words. According to Marceau's entry in Who's Who, his last mimodrama was Le Chapeau Melon (1997).
It was, however, for his solo performances that Marceau became internationally famous. In the style exercises - his pantomimes de style, developed from earlier work done by Decroux and Barrault on dramatic movement - he elaborated on the possibilities of the fixed point in space to achieve illusions, such as leaning against walls, going up stairs or struggling against the wind.
Despite their brevity, some of these pieces could be profoundly moving and were open to different interpretations. In The Cage, for example, a prisoner struggled to escape, forces open the bars and steps out, only to find himself in another cage, apparently made of glass, which begins to close in on him.
One of Marceau's most popular compositions was Bip as David and Goliath, which he took to the US in 1955. This was a dazzling piece of virtuosity, in which he played both characters, separating them by a small screen and changing from one to the other with such rapidity that the story seemed to flow as smoothly as if there were two actors on stage.
Marceau's popular appeal spread first with his tours and then through his film appearances. His first big international tour was that 1955 US trip, following a debut at the Stratford festival, in Ontario, Canada. Tours continued to the five continents throughout his career, with his last world tour ending in Australia in 2006.
His film appearances included a mime version of A Christmas Carol for BBC television (1973) and Shanks (1973), in which he played both a deaf and mute puppeteer and a (speaking) mad scientist. He was also in Mel Brooks's Silent Movie (1976), in which he uttered the film's only word, "Non" and he played Professor Ping in Barbarella (1968).
He wrote and illustrated children's books, established his own international mime school in Paris, was awarded one of France's highest honours, the Officier de la Legion d'Honneur (1986) and was elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts.
Away from the theatre, he enjoyed painting and writing in the 18th-century farmhouse in Normandy, where he lived with his family.
Throughout his life, Marceau was striving for perfection within strictly defined limits. He did not mind using music to add atmosphere, but he always believed mime should be wordless. Unfortunately, the hectic pace never allowed him much time to stop and take stock of his art. New pieces were added to his wide repertoire, but the style hardly changed in 40 years.
Perhaps, in the end, Marceau's most valuable gift to the art of mime was that, having perfected it to a level where no one could successfully imitate him, he forced mime actors to find new directions that he himself never explored. Today, mime is no longer synonymous with Marceau and his white face: it is much more. "And that," he once said, "is the greatest tribute one could have."
He was married three times and had two sons and two daughters.
Marcel Marceau (Marcel Mangel): born March 22nd, 1923; died September 22nd, 2007.