Marcel Marceau: The Legendary Mime Who Served in the French Resistance Fought the Nazis, and Saved Countless Children

Renowned French Mime, Marcel Marceau, was born On this Day, March 22, 1923. Expert in the practice of silence, his most famous quote is, "".

Born in Strasbourg, France as Marcel Mangel— his father, Charles Mangel, was a kosher butcher originally from Będzin, Poland. His mother, Anne Werzberg, came from Yabluniv, present-day Ukraine.

When Marcel was four years old, the family moved to Lille, but they later returned to Strasbourg. When he was 16, the Nazis marched into eastern France. Marcel and his family fled with his family to Limoges in the southwest where he lived in hiding.

He would ultimately change his name to Marceau— to hide his Jewish roots, and to honor François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers, a general of the French Revolution.

His father was a baritone who loved music and the theater, and he introduced Marcel to both at an early age. Marcel was captivated by the silent film stars of the era: Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the Marx brothers.

He was schooled in the Paris suburbs at the home of Yvonne Hagnauer, while pretending to be a worker at the school she directed.

The Mime skills he developed proved invaluable for another purpose: to help him smuggle Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied France.

His cousin Georges Loinger, one of the members of the French Jewish Resistance in France (Organisation Juive de Combat-OJC, aka Armée Juive), urged him to join the French Jewish Resistance in France in the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust.

With his brother Alain, Marceau became increasingly active in the French Resistance, altering children's identity cards by changing birth dates to trick the Nazis into thinking they were too young to be deported, and helping children escape to Switzerland.

Marceau personally smuggled at least 70 youngsters out of France and across the Alps to Switzerland, rescuing them from almost certain slaughter in the concentration camps.

He would say that he used his pantomime skills to keep the children silent during the most dangerous moments.

Marceau’s talent of mimicry also may have saved his own life during the war, when he ran into a unit of 30 German soldiers. The mimic pretended to be an advance guard of a larger French force and convinced the Germans to retreat.

In 1944 Marcel's father was captured by the Gestapo and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was killed. Marcel's mother survived.

It’s been said that Marcel never fully recovered from the horrors of the Holocaust, and his father’s death in Auschwitz.

"Yes, I cried for him," Marceau said. But he said he also thought of the others killed.

"Among those kids was maybe an Einstein, a Mozart, somebody who (would have) found a cancer drug," he told reporters in 2000. "That is why we have a great responsibility. Let us love one another."

By 1944, the American troops noticed his skills, and his first big performance was in an army tent in front of 3,000 American soldiers following the liberation of Paris. During this time, because he spoke English, French and German well, he served as a liaison officer with General Patton.

Some of Marceau's later work reflected the somber experiences. Even the character Bip, who chased butterflies in his debut, took on the grand themes of humanity.

Marcel's life as a performer began with the liberation of Paris from the Nazis. He enrolled in Charles Dullin's School of Dramatic Art, studying with the renowned mime Etienne Decroux.

On a tiny stage at the Theatre de Poche, a smoke-filled Left Bank cabaret, he sought to perfect the style of mime that would become his trademark.

The on-stage persona Bip was born in 1947, a sad-faced double whose eyes lit up with childlike wonder as he discovered the world. Bip was a direct descendant of the 19th century harlequin, but his clownish gestures, Marceau said, were inspired in part by his movie hero, Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, and Keaton.

During a speech when he received a humanitarian award at the University of Michigan, he said that he drew on elements from history and cinema to create Bip’s name—which riffs off the character Pip from Great Expectations—and his look.

Marceau likened his character to a modern-day Don Quixote, "alone in a fragile world filled with injustice and beauty."

Dressed in a white sailor suit, a top hat - a red rose perched on top, the outfit signified life's fragility and Bip became his alter ego, covering the gamut of human experience, and emotion. He went to war and ran a matrimonial service.

In one famous sketch, "Public Garden," Marceau played all the characters in a park, from little boys playing ball to old women with knitting needles—but Bip's misadventures were limitless, extending to butterflies and lions, and the venues where he performed extended from ships and trains to dancehalls and restaurants.

In 1949, Marceau's newly formed mime troupe was the only one of its kind in Europe. But it was only after a hugely successful tour across the United States in the mid-1950s that Marceau received the acclaim that would make him an international star.

Single-handedly, Marceau revived the art of mime, which dates to antiquity and continued until the 19th century through the Italian Commedia dell'Arte, or improvised theater.

"I have a feeling that I did for mime what (Andres) Segovia did for the guitar, what (Pablo) Casals did for the cello," he once told The Associated Press in an interview.

In 1978, Marceau established his own school, École Internationale de Mimodrame de Paris, Marcel Marceau (International School of Mimodrame of Paris, Marcel Marceau). In 1996, he established the Marceau Foundation to promote mime in the United States.

Marceau also made film appearances. The most famous was Mel Brooks' 1976 film "Silent Movie" - he had the only speaking line, "Non!"

He won the Emmy Award for his work on television, was elected member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin and was declared a "National treasure" in Japan.

As he aged, Marceau kept performing, never losing the agility that made him famous.

A perforated ulcer nearly killed Marceau in the Soviet Union in December 1985. He was rushed home to Paris in critical condition, but bounced back to the stage five months later.

Marceau performed all over the world in order to spread the "art of silence" (L'art du silence).

During an interview with CBS in 1987, Marceau tried to explain some of his inner feelings:

The art of silence speaks to the soul, like music, making comedy, tragedy, and romance, involving you and your life. . . . creating character and space, by making a whole show on stage – showing our lives, our dreams, our expectations.

But he only referred to his Jewish experience in one piece and explicitly stated that Bip was not intended to be a specifically Jewish character. In “Bip Remembers,” Marcel explained that he returns to his childhood memories and home and shows life and death in war.

One of the people he alluded to in that sketch was his father, Charles Mangel, who was murdered at Auschwitz.

Like many survivors of that dark time, Marceau went on to do great things in the performing arts. After the war, he began studying mime at the Sarah Bernhardt Theater in Paris and in 1947, created his most iconic character, Bip. “Destiny permitted me to live,” he said in his 2001 speech. “This is why I have to bring hope to people who struggle in the world.”

He would later allude to his character’s dark origins, saying on another occasion that “the people who came back from the [concentration] camps were never able to talk about it… My name is Mangel. I am Jewish. Perhaps that, unconsciously, contributed towards my choice of silence.”

On top of his Legion of Honor and his countless honorary degrees, he was invited to be a United Nations goodwill ambassador for a 2002 conference on aging.

"If you stop at all when you are 70 or 80, you cannot go on," he told the AP in 2003. "You have to keep working."

The fact that, today, most people know what a mime looks like—the white face with cartoonish features, the black and white clothes—is largely thanks to Marcel Marceau, born Marcel Mangel.

Marceau's full company production Les Contes Fantastiques (Fantasy Tales) opened to great acclaim at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris.

Marceau was married three times: first to Huguette Mallet, with whom he had two sons, Michel and Baptiste; then, to Ella Jaroszewicz, with whom he had no children. His third wife was Anne Sicco, with whom he had two daughters, Camille and Aurélia.

Marceau died in a retirement home in Cahors, France, on 22 September 2007 at the age of 84. At his burial ceremony, the second movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 (which Marceau long used as an accompaniment for an elegant mime routine) was played, as was the sarabande of Bach's Cello Suite No. 5. Marceau was interred at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Marceau was, perhaps, the world master of showing rather than telling. one critic said: "He accomplishes in less than two minutes what most novelists cannot do in volumes."

As a stylist of pantomime, Marceau was without peer.

What few knew until recently was that the man beloved to millions as a clown was an unsung hero of the French Resistance who risked his life for years to fight the Nazis and save the lives of children.

After the war, he rarely discussed his role in the Resistance. “I don’t like to speak about myself,” he added modestly, “because what I did humbly during the war was only a small part.”

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