He would have been 100 this year. The mime Marceau, whose real name is Marcel Mangel, died on September 22, 2007, left to posterity the character of “Bip”, cousin of Pierrot la Lune: a sad clown, inspired by his role as Baptiste in Les Enfants du paradis by Marcel Carné in 1945, whose acrobatic pantomimes marked generations of spectators. And whose swaying gait that makes him back up as he pretends to walk even inspired Michael Jackson his famous “Moonwalk”.
Born in Strasbourg on March 22, 1923, the artist was not intended for the stage at the start. The son of a butcher (Charles Mangel, who dreamed of himself an opera singer) and an artist mother (Anna Werzberg) who instilled in him a taste for books, the boy began by studying drawing. A refugee in the Dordogne at the start of the Second World War, when the German army conquered Alsace, then in Haute-Vienne, the young Marcel enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts in Limoges in 1941.
Marcel Mangel also helped his cousin, Georges Loinger, to evacuate Jewish children to Switzerland, from Lyon to Annemasse via the Garel network. He will share his taste for drawing with these toddlers. On February 11, 1944, his father was arrested in Limoges, before being deported to Auschwitz, from which he never returned. Marcel Mangel must then change his identity. He borrows from a general of the Empire of Napoleon I the name of Marceau, taken from a poem by Victor Hugo, read in Les Châtiments (1853).
*Serge Aboukrat Gallery: 2, rue Bourbon-le-Château, Paris 6th.
