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Marcel Marceau | page 1, 2, 3

The antipathy is often justified. With the exception of a few rare talents, most are nothing but genetically inferior spawns, mimicking the one true practitioner. The trouble is that these watered-down Marceaus rarely get it right -- and in so doing have made mime a four-letter word. "There is," as Marceau says, "only one Marceau." Yes, he's the real thing. He has an impeccable comic sense, and knows how to make you feel, in your soul, the tragic moment. It's no accident that children are his best audiences, because his art demands active participation, imagination. His is a world fashioned out of thin air. You see a statue, a pickpocket, a matador, a lion tamer, a soldier, a man passionately embraced by his lover. Marceau's highly stylized, lyrical sketches can be light and whimsical or bitingly satiric and dark. "Marceau in our time," says New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes, "remains the supremely eloquent voice of silence and poet of gesture."

Perhaps true appreciation of Marceau requires a step back in time. Before Marceau broke out of an invisible box and stepped into millions of American's living rooms on Max Liebman's "Show of Shows" nearly 40 years ago, you could fit the number of people who knew or much less cared anything about the art of pantomime in a Citroen. What we know of mime -- the mute theatrics, the exaggerated body language, the requisite black-and-white get-up -- was essentially minted by Marceau.

From an early age, the theater seemed Marceau's destiny. Born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, France, on March 22, 1923, he came from a lively Jewish family with socialist ideals and an artistic bent. His extended family included many musicians and dancers. By the age of 7, Marceau was entertaining neighborhood friends with his comic talent. "I discovered I could make people laugh and cry without speaking," says Marceau, who wasn't "doing mime." He was, in fact, imitating Charlie Chaplin. (Indeed, Marceau's thickly lined eyes and mouth and black-and-white silhouette evoke Chaplin's silent-screen image.)

When Marceau was 15, his life unraveled. On the day France entered World War II, his family was given two hours to pack. Marceau and his older brother, Alain, fled to temporary safety in Limoges. Alain became a leader of the local French underground, and young Marcel joined in. To hide their Jewish origins, the brothers changed their family name to the solidly patriotic Marceau, a famous general in the French Revolution.

Marceau's wartime activities presaged his later artistic role as illusionist. Using red crayons and black ink, he altered the ages of French youths' identity cards, proving them too young to be sent to labor camps. And later, masquerading as a Boy Scout director leading campers on a hike in the Alps, he saved hundreds of Jewish children's lives by smuggling them into Switzerland. No surprise, then, that his most affecting works -- notably "The Trial," "The Cage" and "Bip Remembers," which recounts Marceau's own wartime experiences -- are highly political.

In 1944, Marceau's father was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where he died. His mother headed to Perigueux, in the south of France, with the two brothers, but when the situation became too dangerous, Alain and Marcel fled to Paris. Despite the desperate times, Marceau continued entertaining fantasies of a future in the theater. "I wanted to be a speaking actor," he insists, though most of his theatrical inspirations were silent screen stars: Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy and the Marx Brothers.

Again his career was put on hold when he entered DeGaulle's Free French Army. Because he spoke such good English, he was appointed as a liaison officer with Patton's army. When he returned to Paris, the city was liberated, and Marceau was free to pursue his dreams. In 1946, he enrolled in Paris' famous Charles Dullin School of Dramatic Art at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre.

It was at the Dullin School that Marceau found his mentor, renowned teacher Etienne Decroux, from whom Marceau would learn that there was, in fact, an art called mime. Decroux had invented an exacting physical grammar, "moving statuary," that called for a virtuoso performer capable of perfect isolation and precise movement. Theater students weren't lining up at the door. "In those days," says Marceau, "mime was a tiny part of drama school study, like saber fencing. Most actors found it too tiring. But it captivated me."

"You're a born mime," declared Decroux, and it was so. But Marceau soon parted ways with his mentor, who was at heart less an entertainer than an academic. Taking Decroux's uncompromising grammar as a launching point, Marceau developed his own style, a language that proved to be more accessible to the masses -- mime for the mainstream. His invention of "mimodramas" signaled the true beginning of modern mime and the end of his relationship with Decroux. Believing that Marceau had cheapened the "science" of mime, Decroux never forgave his star pupil.

This mainstream mime, however, enchanted audiences, especially starting in 1947, when Marceau created his alter ego, "the dreamy little poet" Bip. Dressed in striped sailors shirt and white flair pants, Bip was a classic underdog, a sweet loser who tried hard, and inevitably failed. First playing at Paris' diminutive Theatre de Poche, Bip, aka Marceau, swiftly gained enough fame to take his show on tour, performing throughout Switzerland, Italy, Belgium and Holland. Over the next 10-plus years, he wrote dozens of mimodramas. In 1955, he decided he was ready to take his show overseas. If Marceau could make it in New York, he could make it anywhere.

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