French mime Marcel Marceau, who turned silence into poetry, dies at 84

PARIS – Marcel Marceau, the master of mime who transformed silence into poetry with lithe gestures and pliant facial expressions that spoke to generations of young and old, has died. He was 84.\nWearing white face paint, soft shoes and a battered hat topped with a red flower, Marceau breathed new life into an art that dates back to ancient Greece. He played out the human comedy through his alter-ego Bip without ever uttering \na word.\nOffstage, he was famously chatty. “Never get a mime talking. He won’t stop,” he once said.\nA French Jew, Marceau escaped deportation to a Nazi death camp during World War II, unlike his father, who died in Auschwitz. Marceau worked with the French Resistance to protect Jewish children and later used the memories of his own life to feed his art.\nHe gave life to a wide spectrum of characters, from a peevish waiter to a lion tamer to an old woman knitting, and to the best-known Bip.\nHis biggest inspiration was Charlie Chaplin. In turn, Marceau inspired countless young performers – Michael Jackson borrowed his famous “moonwalk” from a Marceau sketch, “Walking Against \nthe Wind.”\nMarceau’s former assistant Emmanuel Vacca said on French radio that the performer died Saturday in Paris, but gave no details.\nIn one of Marceau’s most poignant and philosophical acts, “Youth, Maturity, Old Age, Death,” Marceau wordlessly showed the passing of an entire life in just minutes.\nHe took his art to stages across the world, performing in Asia, Europe and the United States, his “second country,” where he first performed in 1955 and returned every two years afterward. He performed for Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and \nBill Clinton.\nTireless, Marceau took his art to Cuba for the first time in September 2005.\n“France loses one of its most eminent ambassadors,” President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a statement. Prime Minister Francois Fillon praised Marceau as “the master” with the rare gift of “being able to communicate with each and everyone beyond the barriers \nof language.”\nThe onstage 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 Chaplin and Buster Keaton.\nMarceau likened his character to a modern-day Don Quixote, “alone in a fragile world filled with injustice and beauty.”\nSingle-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.\n“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. Marceau started his own company, then in 1978 the International School of Mime-Drama.\nMarceau also made film appearances. The most famous was in Mel Brooks’ 1976 film “Silent Movie” – he had the only speaking line, “Non!”\nAs he aged, Marceau kept performing, never losing the agility that made him famous.\n“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.”