Marcel Marceau, known as the mime Marceau, stage name of Marcel Mangel, born Mars 22, 1923 in Strasbourg and died September 22, 2007 in Cahors, is a French mime and actor. He achieved international fame with his silent character Bip, created in 1947.
Biography
Youth

Born in Strasbourg (Bas-Rhin) into a Jewish family, he is the second son of Charles Mangel (born July 27, 1895 in Będzin, in the south of Poland), a kosher butcher1 who would have liked to be a singer, and of Anna Werzberg, a mother passionate about books2.

In 1926, the family moved to Lille for professional reasons. At that time, his aunt Fanny, his father's sister, introduced him to the world of cinema and the films of Charlie Chaplin. The influence of the character of Charlot on young Marcel is immense and will not leave him throughout his life.

His baritone father frequently took him to the opera or boxing. Sharing his childhood between two regions, the family returned to live in Strasbourg where, until 1938, Marcel studied at the Fustel-de-Coulanges high school. During the 1938-1939 school year, his classmate was Germain Muller, who, on Mars 27, 1990, presented him with a Golden Pretzel3. The evacuation of 1939 separated them. They will not meet again until after the war. According to Charles Muller, his French teacher4, he was the best student in recitation and poetry.

His family of Polish Jewish origin was evacuated like the rest of the Strasbourg population at the start of the Second World War. She settled first in Chancelade then in Périgueux, and in 1941, in Limoges where Marcel continued his studies at the Gay-Lussac high school during the second term; he appears there as a good student; At the same time, he joined the Limoges school of decorative arts where he practiced ceramics5. The principal of the Gay-Lussac high school, Joseph Storck, a Righteous Among the Nations, protects the Jewish students.

In 1942, Marcel Mangel was a theater instructor in Montintin (Haute-Vienne), directed by Doctor Raymond Lévy, from Reims, and at the children's home of the Hagnauer couple in Sèvres, a boarding school which hid around a hundred Jewish children , where he is known by his totem name: “Kangaroo”6. Yvonne Hagnauer received the title of Righteous Among the Nations in 1974. Thanks to his talent as an actor, he gives theater lessons to Jewish children to allow them to play down a tense situation and to ward off their fear5. Along with his first cousin Georges Loinger, he even participated in the flight of around thirty Jewish children to Switzerland5. Under the influence of this first cousin, a great resistance fighter, and his brother Simon Mangel, Marcel joined the Resistance in 1942 in Limoges within the FTP Dordogne Nord sector. He then took the pseudonym Marceau. He says he “took him into the Resistance because of the verse by Victor Hugo, in Les Châtiments: “Joubert sur l’Adige/Marceau sur le Rhine”. I was born in Bas-Rhin and I wanted to drive the Germans out of France”7.

On February 19, 1944, Marcel Mangel's father was arrested in Limoges in the butcher's shop where he was employed8 and deported from Bobigny station in convoy no. 69 of Mars 7, 19449 to Auschwitz where he was murdered. At the Liberation, Marceau joined General de Lattre's First Army and fought in the German campaign10.
The mime: “I will be a mime or nothing”
Marcel Marceau in 1962.

After attending the National School of Decorative Arts in Limoges, which left him with a taste for drawing and painting, Marcel Marceau became a student of Charles Dullin, Jean-Louis Barrault and Étienne Decroux who established the "grammar » of the art of mime which he called “mobile statuary”.

It is because he has a throaty, muffled, veiled voice, very handicapping for his future profession as an actor, that he decides to become a mime11.
Marcel Marceau, 1958, Alexandre Frenel

For Marcel Marceau, the art of mime draws its poetic force from this commitment of the whole body to give form to the invisible, to create metaphor through gestures and gaze. At the Poche Montparnasse theater, on Mars 22, 1947, the artist's 24th birthday, a strange character emerges from the shadows of the wings, Pierrot Lunar, a “blurred lunatic” with smoky eyes and a torn mouth. 'a red line, a funny top hat on the head, a trembling red flower serving as a panache for this lanky Don Quixote struggling against the windmills of existence: "Bip" was born, as inseparable from Marceau as Chaplin's Charlot. “Speech is not necessary to express what is in our hearts,” he said. In homage to the character of “Pip” from the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens12: “Bip is a timeless character, while being close to my childhood dreams. He collides with life which is both a great circus and a great mystery, and I like to say that he always ends up defeated, but always victorious... He is at the same time the man in the street, a vagabond of the that

During his long career, Marcel Marceau brought the art of mime to stages around the world, breaking down the boundaries of language and restoring this art to a cosmopolitan and popular scope. Whether as a soloist or as a playwright through his mimodrama company, he will never stop questioning theatrical art through the bias of silence.[ref. necessary]18. He said: “In my mimodramas and in my pantomimes at the theater, I can build a world as I would like it to be, showing the tearing, the evil, by not showing abandonment but a cry of hope. I believe in human redemption through theater.”

Marcel Marceau created a character, but also an original style, practiced by himself and by his company, then taught in his school. His open-mindedness allowed him to join the Honorary Committee of the Mimos Festival, made up of Jean-Louis Barrault, Jacques Lecoq, Bob Wilson, Kazuo Ohno, for a few years Maguy Marin then Josef Nadj19. The coming together of these exceptional personalities, very different from each other, showed that mime had reached the heights of creativity20.

Eternally dressed in white bell bottom pants pulled up above the waist, a sailor top, a gray camisole with large round buttons and a patched snapback hat from which emerges a scarlet flower, with his characteristic makeup (the face floured with white that he makes himself, the eyebrows in circumflex accent, the eyes rimmed in black and the lips of blood), the mime Marceau becomes over the years one of the most popular French artists known throughout the world. His tours in the United States created a real theatrical revolution in the 1950s, where much was mentioned, in particular, his “walking against the wind” movement, the origin of Michael JACKSON 's moonwalk.

In France, he played in 1975 in the prestigious Court of Honor of the Palais des Papes for the Avignon Festival.

In 1978, he created an international mimodrama school in Paris, located in the basement of the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin at no. 17 rue René-Boulanger, with the will and fierce hope of realizing one of his aspirations. the deepest: art as a meeting point of all cultures where students of more than twenty nationalities, from 18 to 25 years old, rub shoulders. While this school was initially supposed to see the light of day in New York, the mayor of Paris Jacques Chirac and his cultural advisor Marcel Landowski allowed its opening on November 15, 197821. Classes in mime, classical dance, acrobatics and dramatic arts are taught there by a dozen teachers including his wife and disciple Anne Sicco. “It is not enough to use a technique, to leave a school to become an artist. We must create a spirit and a dramatic method that helps the student evolve22. »
Grave of Marcel Marceau in Paris, at the Père-Lachaise cemetery (division 21).

Twenty-seven years later, in 2005, Marcel Marceau's school permanently closed its doors due to savings requested by the Paris town hall23, with the project of creating another structure (which would become the ESAD in 2007 under the direction of Jean-Claude Cotillard).
Private life

In April 1959