Marcel Marceau

Marcel Marceau: Silence as an Act of Resistance

Before silence was his art it was his method of survival. At seventeen, in occupied France, he was moving Jewish children across the border toward Switzerland, and he used mime to keep them quiet on the way. The technique that would later fill theatres on six continents began as a way of stopping small children from making a sound that would get them killed. His father did not survive; Charles Mangel, a kosher butcher, was taken by the Gestapo in 1944 and died at Auschwitz.

Mangel Becomes Marceau

He was born Marcel Mangel on 22 March 1923 in Strasbourg, into a Jewish family. His father Charles came from Bedzin in Poland; his mother Anne Werzberg came from Yabluniv, in what is now Ukraine, and through her he was a cousin of the Israeli singer Yardena Arazi. Under German occupation Marcel and his elder brother Alain took the surname Marceau, after Francois Severin Marceau-Desgraviers, a general of the French Revolution: an assumed identity that was also a statement of nationality. He joined the Jewish resistance organisation Organisation Juive de Combat, worked out of Yvonne Hagnauer's home while posing as a school employee, and helped move Jewish children and adults to safety. Hagnauer was later recognised as Righteous Among the Nations. After the liberation of Paris in August 1944 Marceau performed for three thousand Allied troops, and his fluency in French, English and German made him a liaison officer with Patton's Third Army. His mother survived.

Dullin, Decroux, Barrault

In 1945 he enrolled at Charles Dullin's School of Dramatic Art at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Paris. His teachers were among the architects of modern physical theatre: Etienne Decroux, who had systematised corporeal mime, and Jean-Louis Barrault, whose company he joined. Barrault cast him as Arlequin in the pantomime *Baptiste*, and the notices were immediate. His own first mimodrama, *Praxitele and the Golden Fish*, drew unanimous praise.

Bip

In 1947, at the Theatre de Poche, he introduced Bip the Clown: a striped pullover, a battered silk opera hat with a red flower, a white face. Bip was a descendant of Pierrot and a cousin of Chaplin's tramp, a figure of persistent, defeated optimism who could be a lion tamer, a matador or a dance-hall musician and who lost every time. Around Bip, Marceau built a repertoire of what he called silent exercises, short pieces that have since become the standard vocabulary of the form: *The Cage*, in which invisible walls close in; *The Mask Maker*, in which a smiling mask refuses to come off; *In The Park*; and above all *Walking Against the Wind*, an illusion so exact that it was borrowed, decades later, by Michael Jackson, who was his friend for nearly twenty years. "I used to go see Marcel Marceau all of the time," Jackson said. He would take the techniques "and include it into rhythm and dance."

In 1949 Marceau won the Deburau Prize for his mimodrama *Death before Dawn* and founded the Compagnie de Mime Marcel Marceau, at the time the only company in the world dedicated to pantomime. In 1955 he took his first American tour, opening at New York's Phoenix Theater and moving to the larger Barrymore when demand outran the house. From 1959 he mounted a year-long retrospective at the Ambigu in Paris, including an adaptation of Gogol's *The Overcoat*. He toured North and South America, Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe, and was still doing it into his eighties, with a final world tour taking in the United States in 2004, Europe in 2005 and Australia in 2006.

The One Word

He appeared on television with Max Liebman, Mike Douglas and Dinah Shore, made three pantomime concerts with Red Skelton, and had his own show, *Meet Marcel Marceau*. On film he played Professor Ping in *Barbarella* in 1968, seventeen roles in *First Class* in 1970, and a deaf-mute puppeteer alongside a mad scientist in *Shanks* in 1974. His most quoted screen moment lasted a syllable: in Mel Brooks's *Silent Movie* in 1976, a film with no dialogue, Marceau was given the only audible line in the picture. He said "Non!"

The Teacher

He took the transmission of the form seriously enough to build institutions for it. In 1969 he opened the Ecole Internationale de Mime at the Theatre de la Musique in Paris, running it for two years with five mime teachers alongside instructors in fencing, acrobatics and ballet. In 1978 he founded the Ecole Internationale de Mimodrame de Paris, Marcel Marceau. In 1996 he set up the Marceau Foundation to promote mime in the United States. He wrote and illustrated children's books, including *The Story of Bip* and alphabet and counting books, published the art book *La ballade de Paris et du Monde* in 1966 and the lithograph collection *Le Troisieme Oeil* in 1982, and wrote the preface to Philippe Petit's *On The High Wire*.

Why Marcel Is Called a Genius

This is a claim about physical craft, not intellect, and it should be stated that way. What Marceau possessed was extraordinary kinesthetic precision: an ability to reproduce the mechanics of resistance, weight and contact so exactly that an audience perceives objects that are not there. *Walking Against the Wind* is a technical achievement first, a sequence of muscular decisions about balance and delay accurate enough to make air visible, and it entered popular culture so completely that most people who imitate it have no idea whose it was. His second and rarer gift was compression: *The Mask Maker* and *The Cage* deliver a complete tragic structure in a few minutes without a word, which is why he could sell out houses in Tokyo, Rio and Detroit without translation. He described the discipline himself as the "art of silence" and said it "speaks to the soul, like music, making comedy, tragedy, and romance." The honest counter-case is that mime is a narrow instrument and Marceau's dominance of it was so total that the form has struggled to produce a successor, or to escape the association with a single striped shirt and a painted face. His sentimentality dates badly. His film work is negligible and his writing minor. And a good deal of the reverence he attracts now flows from the biography, from a resistance record that is genuinely heroic and entirely separate from the stagecraft. The two should be honoured, but not confused.

Legacy

France made him a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, an Officer of the Legion d'honneur and, in November 1998, a Grand Officer of the Ordre national du Merite at the hands of Jacques Chirac. He was elected to the academies of fine arts in Berlin and Munich and to the Academie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France, and took honorary doctorates from Princeton, Michigan, Ohio State and Linfield. In April 2001 the University of Michigan gave him the Wallenberg Medal for the courage he had shown helping Jews during the war. New York City declared a Marcel Marceau Day in 1999; the United Nations made him a goodwill ambassador for its Second World Assembly on Ageing in 2002. He died at Cahors on 22 September 2007, aged eighty-four, and was buried at Pere Lachaise to Mozart and Bach, the same pieces he had used to accompany his work. Jesse Eisenberg played him in the 2020 film *Resistance*, which told the part of the story he had told least often himself.