Marcel Marceau
Mime artist Marcel Marceau died in Paris on Saturday, Sept. 22, at the age of 84. The cause of death was not immediately known.
The Strasbourg-born Marceau’s most famous character was Bip, a melancholy clown with a limp red flower in his hat. According to reports on his death, the mime’s artistic inspirations were the clowns of the Commedia dell’Arte, Hollywood silent comics such as Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and the stylized gestures of Chinese opera and the Noh plays of Japan.
Marceau appeared in a handful of films, most notably Mel Brooks‘ 1976 Silent Movie, in which he has the only speaking line in the otherwise silent film: Non!
(Marceau doesn’t seem to have appeared in Marcel Carné’s 1945 classic Les Enfants du Paradis. Apparently, reports claiming that Marceau played Arlequin in that film have based that information on a misreading of the Wikipedia segment on Marceau’s early career.)
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