Marceau, Marcel

Marceau, Marcel (1923– ), French actor, the finest modern exponent of mime or, as he prefers to call it, mimodrama. He joined the company of Jean-Louis Barrault in 1945, but a year later abandoned conventional acting to study mime, basing his work on the character of the 19th-century French Pierrot and evolving his own Bip, a white-faced clown with sailor trousers and striped jacket. In this part, which he first played at the tiny Théâtre de Poche in Paris in 1946, he toured all over the world, accompanied by supporting players he had trained himself. He also evolved short pieces of concerted mime, including one based on Gogol's The Overcoat, and longer symbolic dramas such as his own The Mask-Maker, and with the aid of a screen contrived to appear almost simultaneously as two sharply contrasted characters—David and Goliath, or the Hunter and the Hunted. His work gave immense impetus to the study of mime by young actors, who also benefited from the many demonstrations of his technique which he gave to students. His École de mimodrame de Paris opened at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin in 1978.