Marcel Marceau is dead.
From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7009189.stm
Legendary mime artist Marcel Marceau, who has died aged 84, captivated the world for decades.
He epitomised the silent art, eliciting laughter and tears from audiences around the world.
"Mime, like music, knows neither borders nor nationalities," he once said.
"If laughter and tears are the characteristics of humanity, all cultures are steeped in our discipline."
Marceau was best known for the melancholy, engaging clown Bip, who he created 60 years ago.
With a stripy top, white face, and limp red flower in his battered silk hat, he charmed with his deft silent movements, and mercurial expressions.
Off stage, Marceau was known as an witty, chatty and generous man.
Marceau was born Marcel Mangel in the Alsatian town of Strasbourg on 22 March 1923.
He was brought up in Lille, where his Jewish father was a butcher.
When World War II came to France, his father was captured and sent by the invading Nazis to Auschwitz, where he died. In 1944 Marceau joined his elder brother in the Resistance, later joining the French Army.
Inspired by the great US actors of the silent film era, Marceau began to study acting in 1946 under Charles Dullin and the great mime teacher Etienne Decroux, who also taught Jean-Louis Barrault.
It was in Marcel Carne's 1947 film Les Enfants du Paradis, starring Barrault, that Marceau - who played Arlequin - first became known as a mime artist.
His talents were spectacular. I remember watching him on the Ed Sullivan show as a young boy and marveling at his ability to communicate complex ideas in silence. As a person destined to have a life focused on speech, I was very early on entranced by a communicator who never used his voice.
Many others have agreed with me.
From http://www.culturevulture.net/Theater/MarcelMarceau.html
A seventy-six year old man, whose only special effects are the ones he creates with his own face and body, without speaking a word, accomplished last night what neither Lotfi Mansouri nor George Lucas nor Michael Tilson Thomas can do: He kept a San Francisco audience so thoroughly enthralled that there was not a sound in the theater - not a whisper, not a cough, not the proverbial pindrop. Absolute silence. (Oh well, Jan Wahl did drop her purse at one point.)Here are a few quotes from Marcel Marceau.
Marcel Marceau is the world's greatest mime - and there are no runners up. His name is synonymous with that of his highly refined art. Mime is sort of the wordless poetry of the theater, using facial expression and dance-like movement to evoke a mood, a character or situation cameo, or a whole story with no verbal content at all. There is a parallel in silent film, where the challenge of nonverbal communication was technologically built into the form, and, indeed, Chaplin and Keaton, et. al., are acknowledged influences on Marceau.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marcel_marceau.html
Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?
I have designed my style pantomimes as white ink drawings on black backgrounds, so that man's destiny appears as a thread lost in an endless labyrinth. I have tried to shed some gleams of light on the shadow of man startled by his anguish.
In silence and movement you can show the reflection of people.
It's good to shut up sometimes.
Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.
Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power.
Never get a mime talking. He won't stop.
To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.
What sculptors do is represent the essence of gesture. What is important in mime is attitude.
Farewell, mon ami.
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