A butcher's son from Strasbourg
Marcel Mangel was born in Strasbourg, France, on March 22, 1923, into a Jewish family. His father, Charles Mangel, was a kosher butcher from Będzin in Poland; his mother, Anne Werzberg, came from what is now western Ukraine. When Marcel was a small boy the family moved to Lille. When he was about five, his mother took him to see a Charlie Chaplin film, and he was entranced. He later said that was when he first wanted to become a mime.
In 1939, as war began, the Jews of Strasbourg near the German border were given two hours to pack before being evacuated to the southwest of France. Marcel, then 15 by the Jewish Virtual Library's account, ended up with his older brother Alain in Limoges.
Joining the Resistance
In Limoges the brothers joined the underground. To hide their Jewish identity they took a new surname, Marceau, borrowed from a general of the French Revolution. Their cousin Georges Loinger was a commander in the secret network of the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, the Jewish children's relief organization, which smuggled Jewish children out of occupied France to neutral countries. Loinger asked Marcel to help.
Marceau's first contribution was with a pen. He altered the ages on identity cards so that young people, Jewish and non-Jewish, appeared too young to be sent to labor camps or deported to work in German factories. He was also hidden for a time at a school in the Paris suburbs run by Yvonne Hagnauer, pretending to be a worker there; Yad Vashem later honored her as Righteous Among the Nations.
Leading children to Switzerland
Loinger asked Marceau to help move Jewish children from an orphanage in Sèvres, near Paris, to Annemasse on the Swiss border, where they could be smuggled across to safety. The children loved him, Loinger later said, and felt safe with him. Marceau posed as a Boy Scout leader. In 2002 he recalled dressing as a scout leader and taking 24 Jewish children, also in scout uniforms, through the forests to the border.
The network's methods were simple and daring. Loinger got children across the Swiss frontier by throwing a ball over the border and telling them to run and fetch it. Resistance members hid identity cards inside sandwiches smeared with mayonnaise, which German guards did not bother to search. Groups of children were presented to checkpoints as scouts or campers on an outing, which is why Marceau's scout uniform mattered.
Silence could mean survival on those journeys. According to Philippe Mora, the son of one of Marceau's Resistance comrades, Marceau used mime to keep the children quiet as they escaped, and Marceau himself said he used pantomime to keep children silent at the most dangerous moments. Accounts of how many children he helped save vary; History.com puts it at least 70. Near the end of the war, according to the same account, he bluffed a group of about 30 German soldiers into surrendering by claiming to be part of a larger French force.
A loss that shaped him
In 1944 Marceau's father was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. His mother survived. Marceau spoke about his father rarely and with restraint. In his words, if he cried for his father, he had to cry for the millions of people who died. Asked about it in 2002, he said simply that he had cried for his father.
After the liberation of Paris, Marceau joined the French army. Because he spoke French, English and German, he served as a liaison officer with General George Patton's Third Army. In August 1944 he gave his first major performance, to an audience of 3,000 soldiers.
Bip and the art of silence
After the war Marceau studied at Charles Dullin's School of Dramatic Art in Paris under Étienne Decroux, the great teacher of modern mime, and joined the company of Jean-Louis Barrault. His first original mime drama, Praxitele and the Golden Fish, was acclaimed in 1947. That same year he created Bip, a clown in a striped sweater and a battered silk opera hat decorated with a flower, whose small adventures and misfortunes stood for the fragility of life. Bip became his alter ego, as the Tramp had been Chaplin's.
In 1949, after winning the Deburau Prize, named for the 19th-century mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau, for his second mime drama, Death before Dawn, Marceau founded the Compagnie de Mime Marcel Marceau, at the time the only company in the world devoted to pantomime. His pieces, The Cage, Walking Against the Wind, The Mask Maker and Youth, Maturity, Old Age and Death, became classics. One critic said that in less than two minutes the last of these achieved what most novelists cannot in whole volumes. Marceau called his work the art of silence and described it as making the invisible visible. In a 1987 interview with CBS he explained that silence speaks to the soul in the way music does, carrying comedy, tragedy and romance, and showing people their own lives, dreams and hopes.
From 1959 to 1960 a retrospective of his mime dramas, including an adaptation of Gogol's The Overcoat, ran for a full year at the Ambigu theater in Paris. He created more than a dozen other full-length pieces, among them Pierrot de Montmartre, The Three Wigs, The Pawn Shop and a silent Don Juan, and in his last years a new company production, Les Contes Fantastiques, opened to acclaim at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris.
A language everyone understands
Because mime needs no words, Marceau's art crossed every border. After his North American debut at the Stratford Festival in Canada, his first United States tour in 1955 and 1956 began at the Phoenix Theater in New York and moved to a larger theater to meet demand. He went on to perform across South America, Africa, Australia, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Russia and Europe, and reached millions more on television. He kept touring into his 80s, with a last world tour in the United States in 2004 and later performances in Europe and Australia.
He also taught. In 1978 he founded the International School of Mimodrama of Paris, and in 1996 the Marceau Foundation to promote mime in the United States. Generations of performers, from actors and clowns to dancers, learned their craft from him or from his students; Michael Jackson said he often went to watch Marceau perform and borrowed from his movement. In 2002 Marceau served as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Second World Assembly on Aging.
On screen and in print
Marceau reached many people through film and television as well as on stage. He appeared on American variety shows hosted by Dinah Shore and Mike Douglas, gave pantomime concerts with the comedian Red Skelton, and had his own television special, Meet Marcel Marceau. He played Professor Ping in Barbarella (1968), 17 different roles in First Class (1970), and a deaf and mute puppeteer in Shanks (1974). His best-known screen moment is a joke on his own art: in Mel Brooks's Silent Movie (1976), he speaks the only audible word in the whole film, a firm Non.
He also wrote and drew for children: the Marcel Marceau Alphabet Book, the Marcel Marceau Counting Book, The Story of Bip and Bip in a Book, published in several countries. These books, like his performances, invited children to use their imagination to fill in what is not said. Ohio State University, Princeton University and the University of Michigan were among the institutions that gave him honorary doctorates.
Jewish background
Marceau was born into a Jewish family in Strasbourg; his father was a kosher butcher. He changed his surname to hide his Jewish identity under the Nazi occupation, and his father was murdered at Auschwitz. His wartime work was carried out with the Jewish Resistance in France, under his cousin Georges Loinger, who himself was credited with saving about 350 children. In 2001 the University of Michigan awarded Marceau the Wallenberg Medal for his humanitarian courage in aiding Jewish people and other refugees during the war.
Legacy
Marceau received France's highest cultural honors, including the rank of grand officer of the National Order of Merit, and was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. New York declared March 18, 1999, Marcel Marceau Day. He died on September 22, 2007, at the age of 84, and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. In 2020 the film Resistance, with Jesse Eisenberg as Marceau, brought his wartime story to a new audience.
At his burial, the slow movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21, which he had long used for one of his most elegant routines, was played, along with Bach. On what would have been his 100th birthday, March 22, 2023, Google honored him with a Doodle seen around the world.
His legacy is twofold. In the darkest years of the 20th century he risked his life to lead children to safety, and for six decades afterward he gave audiences around the world an art that needed no translation. He said he survived for a reason: to bring hope to people who struggle. Both the children he saved and the millions who watched him in silence are part of that hope.
Sources & further reading
Erin Blakemore, The French Resistance's Secret Weapon? The Mime Marcel Marceau, History.com · Marcel Marceau, Jewish Virtual Library · French hero who saved hundreds of Jewish children dies aged 108, The Times of Israel · Marcel Marceau, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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