marcel marceau r.i.p.

i wonder how many people will say to themselves when they hear this news that they didn't realise he was still alive?

my favourite memory of marcel marceau is, of course, his cameo in mel brooks' film 'silent movie'. marceau is the only person that speaks. he says, "non!" :-)

a brief clip from a tv commercial:


bbc news obituary

from the telegraph
"Michael Jackson admitted drawing on Marceau's work to create his moon-walk."

the times
"In our age of incessant noise, zapping and multi-tasking, it is hard to imagine anyone making a career out of silence."

the grauniad report
"In 1944, Marceau's father was sent to Auschwitz, where he died. Later, he reflected on his father's death: "Yes, I cried for him." But he also thought of all the others killed: "Among those kids was maybe an Einstein, a Mozart, somebody who (would have) found a cancer drug," he told reporters in 2000. "That is why we have a great responsibility. Let us love one another.""

grauniad obit
"Perhaps, in the end, Marceau's most valuable gift to the art of mime was that, having perfected it to a level where no one could successfully imitate him, he forced mime actors to find new directions that he himself never explored. Today, mime is no longer synonynous with Marceau and his white face: it is much more. "And that," he once told me, "is the greatest tribute one could have.""

ny times
"One of his most famous sketches was "The Cage," in which he struggled to escape through an invisible ring of barriers, only to find that one cage succeeds another and there is no escape. In Czechoslovakia before the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, he recalled that audiences understood it as an allegory about capitalism. After the invasion, they saw in it an image of themselves under Russian domination."