FRANCE: Friends and family of world famous mime artist Marcel Marceau gather for his funeral in Paris

Marcel Marceau, the world's best-known mime artist who for decades moved audiences across the globe without uttering a single word, has died aged He was buried at the Paris Pere Lachaise cemetery. The Frenchman's extensive tours and appearances on camera brought his silent art to people around the world. His comic and tragic sketches appealed on a universal level, with each audience interpreting his performance in its own way. "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." On stage, he charmed with his deft silent movements, a white-faced figure with a striped jersey and battered top hat. Off stage, with the costume and the pancake makeup removed, Marceau was a slim, agile man whose eloquent description and explanation complemented his mute mastery of mime. Ella Jaroszewicz, once married to Marceau and colleague says he will always be remembered: "I'm here with my school and the mime company to salute a great artist who has left us with a wonderful world of illusion and poetry which we'll be keeping for the rest of our lifes in our hearts, and with the students on the stages all over the world." In mime, Marceau said, gestures express the essence of the soul's most secret aspiration. "To mime the wind, one becomes a tempest. To mime a fish, you throw yourself into the sea." He created the figure of Bip, the melancholy, engaging clown with a limp red flower in his hat, 60 years ago this year. Etienne Bonduelle was once a student of Marceau. He says it is thanks to Marceau that mime is what it is today: "He invented what we call the modern pantomime, because he used new tools from the 20th century theatre through a dramaturgy from a poetry of Pierrot (the crying clown), Don Quichotte, who was more from a 19th century universe." said Etienne Bonduelle, president of the French mime federation. A great loss to him who learned a lot from Master Marceau, Bonduelle remembers the character: "What I remember of Marceau is what he used to do just before the curtains opened, he would open the curtains and look to see what the public looked like and see how his audience was going to be like. He had the cunning pleasure to do that and to prepare himself for a real love affair with the public and give himself completely with enormous generosity and complicity" said Bonduelle. Marceau traced his ancestry back through Hollywood silent film greats Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to the clowns of the Commedia dell'Arte, a centuries-old European tradition, and to the stylised gestures of Chinese opera and Japan's Noh plays. Marceau was born in the Alsatian town of Strasbourg on March 22, 1923. He was brought up in Lille, where his father was a butcher. When World War Two came, his father was taken hostage and later killed by the invading Nazis and in 1944 Marcel joined his elder brother in the Resistance. He later joined the French Army and served with occupation forces in Germany at the end of the war. He 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 famous 1947 film starring Barrault, "Les Enfants du Paradis", that Marceau, who played Arlequin, first became known as a mime artist. He formed his own mime company in 1948, and the troupe was soon touring other European countries, presenting mime dramas. The company failed financially in 1959, but was revived as a school, the Ecole Internationale de Mimodrame, in 1984. A veteran of dozens of films, one of his best remembered roles was a speaking cameo in "Silent Movie", made by American director Mel Brooks. For Marceau, mime had a philosophical and political level. One of his most famous sketches was "The Cage", in which he struggled to escape through an invisible ring of barriers, only to find that one cage succeeds another and there is no escape. In Czechoslovakia before the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, he recalled that audiences understood it as an allegory about capitalism. After the invasion, they saw in it an image of themselves under Russian domination.

ITN Source | September 27, 2007

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