Marcel Marceau
Marcel Marceau (1923 – 2007), was the world’s most famous mime, and his white-faced character, the melancholy vagabond Bip, became globally famous from TV and stage appearances. Among his accomplishments during a long and eventful career was winning an Emmy Award, getting declared a national treasure in Japan notwithstanding that he was not Japanese, becoming a member of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, and becoming a decades-long friend of Michael Jackson, who borrowed some of Marceau’s moves in his dance routines.
Before becoming world-famous, however, Marceau spent most of WWII in hiding and working for the French Resistance. After the Allies landed in France, he gave his first major performance before an audience of 3000 troops in recently-liberated Paris, after which he joined the Free French army for the remainder of the war. His talent for languages and near fluency in English and German led to his appointment as a liaison officer with Patton’s Third US Army.
His father, a kosher butcher, had to hide the family’s Jewish origins when the Nazis invaded in 1940, and fled with his family to central France, but was captured in 1944 and sent to Auschwitz, where he perished. Marcel moved to Paris with a new name and forged identity papers, and adopting the surname “Marceau” after a French Revolutionary War general, joined the Resistance.
His underground activities included the rescuing of many Jewish children from German clutches, and smuggling them to safety. His talent for miming – a career to which he had aspired ever since he first saw a Charlie Chaplain movie when he was five years old – came in handy to distract and quiet the children as he smuggled them past German guards and across the border to safety in Switzerland.