Marceau (1923-2007), a western cultural icon universally recognized as “The World’s Greatest Mime,” performed professionally worldwide for over 60 years and became virtually synonymous with style pantomime, which he referred to as the “art of silence.” His performances, which include such classic works as The Cage, The Mask Maker, In The Park, and Walking Against the Wind (which Michael Jackson imitated for what became his famous “moonwalk”), have been universally recognized as works of sheer genius. According to at least one critic, his brilliant summation of the ages of man in the famous Youth, Maturity, Old Age and Death “accomplishes in less than two minutes what most novelists cannot do in volumes.”
Marceau was born in Strasbourg, France, as Marcel Mangel, son of a kosher butcher. During the German occupation of France, he and his brother, Alain, hid their identities as Jews and adopted the last name “Marceau,” a name chosen to honor François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers, a general during the French Revolution.
Marceau has performed in Israel at least three times, the first time in 1949. He undertook one of his tours in 1967 two months before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, which he said only increased his admiration for the “ancient race” and his “old cultural heritage.” Displayed here is a ticket to his 1967 performance, on the back of which he has signed his name and added the name of his signature character “Bip,” including an original drawing of Bip’s iconic red flower.
Marceau, preoccupied with Charlie Chaplin from the time of his youth, invented Bip, a character who combines Chaplin’s movements with the look of a harlequin: a white face, a crumpled top hat with a red flower poking out from the top, white tights, ballet plimsolls, eyebrows painted halfway up the forehead and showing a face to the world that bares everything. Bip, named after Pip from Dickens’s Great Expectations, is as innocent as Chaplin’s Little Tramp, as clumsy as Harpo Marx, and as deft as Buster Keaton, whose every movement manifests a beloved simplicity and naïveté. Marceau first presented the chalk-faced Bip, whom he called “the dreamy little poet,” in 1947.
Marceau characterized Bip as his “alter ego,” a sad-faced doppelgänger, a modern everyman and free spirit whose eyes light up with childlike wonder as he discovers the world during his various misadventures: “You don’t laugh or cry in English or French. Bip is allowed to go anywhere and dream many dreams… Bip is the romantic and burlesque hero for our time, [he] is a modern-day Don Quixote.”
In this March 12, 1981 handwritten correspondence to actor Ted Levine, Marceau writes:
Marcel Marceau
c/o Columbia Artists
165 W. 57th Street
New York 19, N.Y. U.S.On Tour through the States
Dear Mr. Levine
Unfortunately, I answer you too late, because you had a deadline… but I shall give my answer even if it is too late. I lost in my office your letter, there was a change of secretary, unfortunately it was discovered again with other letters which were in classified file. I am happy to be able to answer your question.
The major person who influenced my career and therefore my life is undoubtedly Charlie Chaplin, though I discovered as a child the other great talent comedians like Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Stan Laurel and Hardy, and even Harpo Marx. I chose these great performers because through their art they made us feel happy and sad, they made us laugh and they were an answer to the quest for life, our hopes, aspirations and frustrations could come true. They were the essence of drama built too much higher climax, that then wonderful world became ours. The beautiful world of silence I built my art on silence but of course in the realm of the theater, and my deeds are the contribution of their work . . . in time and space in another world, the world of illusion without props or scenes sculpting space out of thin air, making the visible invisible and the invisible visible this is a poets act and this is my life’s goal and therefore I shall keep touring with my silent art, and hope to give my contribution to the enlightenment of man in The Dark World…
Voila – I do hope you can do something with it – even if it is too late – it has been written with my heart. Warmest regards always.
[Signed also as “Bip” with drawing of a flower]
As English was not Marceau’s native language, someone – perhaps his secretary? – added several words in blue ink to increase the comprehension.
Frank Theodore Levine (b. 1957) is an American character actor best known for his roles as Jame Gumb (Buffalo Bill) in the film The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Leland Stottlemeyer in the television series Monk (2002-2009). His father was of Russian-Jewish descent and he describes himself as a “hillbilly Jew.”
While many know Marceau as the greatest mime of all time, few know that he was an authentic Jewish hero who saved many Jewish lives, particularly children, during the Holocaust.
In 1939, when the Nazis marched into eastern France, the Jews of Strasbourg were given just two hours to pack for transport to the southwest of France, and Marceau, 15 at that time, fled with Alain to Limoges, where they joined the French Resistance. Using red crayons and black ink, he skillfully altered the ages of hundreds of Jewish French youths on their identity cards, “proving” them too young to be sent to labor camps. Moreover, he not only forged papers to save teenaged Gentiles – who, pursuant to Vichy-occupied French law, were being sent to factories in Germany to work for the German Army – he made people look much younger in their photos and bribed officials.
Marceau also was active in hiding Jewish children from the Gestapo and the Vichy French police. Later, when the French Jewish Resistance decided to evacuate the Jewish children hidden in an orphanage west of Paris, commander George Loinger asked Marceau, his first cousin, to carry out the mission. Masquerading as a Boy Scout director leading campers on hikes in the Alps, he put his life at risk and saved countless Jewish lives by smuggling the children into Switzerland. He undertook this perilous journey three times, using mime to keep the younger children quiet and calm to facilitate their escape.
Marceau’s talent with body language and mime movement may have saved his life while fighting with the French resistance. He claimed that he was caught entirely by surprise when he accidentally ran into a unit of German soldiers; quickly improvising, he mimicked an advance guard of a large French force and successfully persuaded the German soldiers to retreat.
Word of Marceau’s pantomime antics spread through the troops. He gave his first major performance to Americans in an Army tent before 3,000 troops in August 1944 after the liberation of Paris. He later expressed great pride that his first “review” was in the U.S. Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes.
In 1944, Marceau’s mother headed to Perigueux, in the south of France, with her two sons, but when the situation became too dangerous, they fled to Paris, where Marcel continued to work in the underground. After Paris was liberated, he enlisted in the Free French Army under General Charles de Gaulle and, owing to his excellent command of English, French and German, he was selected to serve as a liaison officer with General George S. Patton.
At the end of the war, Marceau returned to his native Strasbourg, only to learn that his father had been captured in 1944 and deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. He later said, “The people who came back from the camps were never able to talk about it. My name is Mangel. I am Jewish. Perhaps that, unconsciously, contributed towards my choice of silence.” He later incorporated this shattering experience into one of his most complex sketches, Bip Remembers, in which, as he explains, “I go back in memory to my childhood home, how my father took me on a carousel, I show life and death in war, I show Hitler and waves of soldiers being mowed down by machine guns.” Bip Remembers is the only piece in his extensive repertoire in which he deliberately drew on his Jewish experience:
Though Bip is not a Jewish character… I respect our history and suffering and I am sure that the fact I was born a Jew and was in the underground has had an influence. But in my art I belong to the world, beyond religion, to Jews, Christians and even Muslims.
In summing up his religious beliefs, he tells a charming story about being approached by 35 priests after a performance of Creation of the World, a pantomime sketch based upon the Genesis account of creation, who asked him if he was religious. “I answered, ‘I do not practice religion but when I do Creation of the World, G-d enters in me.’” Although he always was open about his “respect for the history and suffering” of the Jewish people, he generally manifested universal aspirations for his art. As early as 2002, he foresaw the growing antisemitism in his beloved France and, though he expressed deep concern about the surge of Jew hatred there, he was certain that “we will overcome it” and was optimistic that “fascism will not succeed in France.” That, of course, remains to be seen, particularly given the dramatic rise of antisemitism in France.
In a rare 2001 interview he granted to a freelance journalist, Marceau summarized his views on his Judaism and the Holocaust this way:
I was once asked about my “Jewish sensitivity,” to which I replied that I would prefer to discuss human sensitivity. Jews are sensitive, like other people, but in the modern world religion should not be so high up [in] the order of the day. I was brought up in a Jewish home, but I was brought up to be human, not fanatical, which is something that I don’t appreciate at all. I learned to become a humanist, and not to dwell on the differences between Jews and Christians.
I must be honest and tell you that I do feel slightly uncomfortable with people dwelling on this Jewish aspect of my life. I have the greatest respect for the sufferance of the Holocaust – my father died in Auschwitz – so I am perfectly well aware of what happened. But this did not make me superior to other people.
I don’t want to be part of a community. I want to be part of the world. I have never been a victim of antisemitism – if you put to one side my war-time experience. That said, I am lucky not to have been sent into a concentration camp. I produced false papers, I took Jewish children to Switzerland when I was a teenager… and [after the war] I went to drama school with Etienne Decroux. But I never denied that I was Jewish. I wanted to give my art to the people… The memory of the Holocaust is so important, though… I am happy that the memory of the Holocaust is kept alive, so that such a tragedy can never begin again.
On April 30, 2001, Marceau was cited for his humanitarianism and acts of courage in aiding Jews during the Holocaust when he was awarded the Wallenberg Medal, which is bestowed by The United States Raoul Wallenberg Committee to “individuals, organizations, and communities whose courage, selflessness and success against great odds personified those of Raoul Wallenberg himself.” Many who learned that Marceau was going to receive the Medal asked, tongue firmly in cheek, if a mime can be expected to give the Award lecture, to which he famously replied: “Never get a mime talking, because he won’t stop.”
Most people, even Marceau’s greatest fans, do not know that he was also an accomplished artist. He began to paint at age seven, was educated in an art school in Limoges, France and, at the start of his career, he considered himself as an artist with mime being a mere side hobby. Even after becoming what many consider to be the world’s greatest mime, he never abandoned his painting, maintaining that the two forms of expression complemented each other and raised his art to new heights. Marceau’s works in watercolors, ink, pencil, and tempera paint are characteristically impressionist that glow with a mystical quality, and he prided himself on his use of color, with his palette comprised mostly of vivid tones of blue, rose, and mauve.
Bip, his most famous character, has had a major influence on the subject matter of many of his watercolors and lithographs, and Marceau’s first lithograph, Bip’s Dreams, portrays Bip, larger than life, with a crowded background of Parisian buildings under an ominous night sky.
Among his notable artistic works is a set of ten paintings in meditation of his thinking accompanied by a poem for each. He draws a parallel between biblical motives and the contemporary manner in which we live, incorporating themes like the creation of the world, Adam and Eve and, in particular, how little respect people gave to their gift from G-d. The story ends with the End of the World, where we all stand together as one on Judgment Day.
Until his death at age 84, Marceau performed 300 times a year and taught four hours a day at his pantomime school in Paris. Interestingly, he died on Yom Kippur; as such, and in accordance with Jewish tradition, this great Jewish hero had the zechut (merit) to die with the proverbial clean slate, having been forgiven by G-d for all his sins. He was buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where his simple stone gravestone is marked with a large Magen David, and French Grand Rabbi of France René-Samuel Sirat recited the Kaddish at his burial ceremony. Sadly, Marceau was ill the last years of his life, he died in debt and, in 2009, a French court ordered the public auction of his belongings to settle his estate.
