Marcel Marceau was a giant of an underappreciated art form

SAY “mime” and the name that comes to mind is Marcel Marceau. Despite a long history that embraces Greek tragedy and Roman farce, it is a much-derided form of art. Its silent exponents, clowns you can’t hear coming, are the butt of a memorably dismissive sketch by Gary Larson, an American cartoonist: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around, and it hits a mime, does anyone care?”

Marceau, who was born 100 years ago in March 1923, is an outlier, admired for a rare ability to transform his body. Yet he, too, is underappreciated—today synonymous with his most famous creation, a chalk-faced clown called Bip who sported a striped jumper and a crumpled stovepipe hat topped with a limp red flower. First presented in 1947, Bip was part harlequin, part homage to Charlie Chaplin’s melancholy bumbler, the Little Tramp. His sad looks and elastic gestures would become a cliché, aped by every street performer who has wrestled with the wind or opened an imaginary door.

In fact Marceau was a complex artist, scarred by adolescent upheaval. He was born Marcel Mangel, into a Jewish family in Strasbourg, and as a child revelled in drawing and gymnastics. In 1939, ahead of the invasion by Nazi Germany, his home town was evacuated. At the urging of a cousin he joined the French Resistance, and his enthusiasms proved invaluable: he altered the documents of Jewish children and posed as a Boy Scout to smuggle others into Spain and Switzerland. (He used mime to encourage the youngsters to stay quiet en route.) He did not manage to save his father, who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and died in Auschwitz.