Marcel Marceau; Resurrected, Personified the Art of Mime

At the outbreak of World War II, his father, a butcher, was arrested, sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp and later executed by the Nazis. The remaining family fled to Limoges. In 1944, Mr. Marceau changed his name and became active in the French underground, altering identity cards and smuggling hundreds of Jewish children into Switzerland as he masqueraded as a Boy Scout director leading a hike in the Alps. He later joined the French army and served during the Allied occupation of Germany.

His first public pantomime was in December 1945 before 3,000 soldiers; Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, reportedly was exuberant in its review.

He entered the School of Dramatic Art in the Sarah Bernhardt Theater in Paris in 1946. That's where he became a student of Etienne Decroux, who had struggled in the 1920s to keep the tradition of mime alive and who taught him the basic "grammar" of the art.

"Even when I started, actors still had contempt for mime," Mr. Marceau told The Washington Post's Henry Allen in 1980, glancing to the side with a rubbery grimace of contempt. "It was an exercise for them, the mime corporelle, all the muscles working. Decroux used to teach us nude."

Nude? Allen asked.

"Of course," said Mr. Marceau, spreading his hands across his abdomen to mime a bikini. "We studied the counterpoint, contrepois, creating the weight of the objects which are not there, I lean against."

Mr. Marceau borrowed the whiteface of the 19th-century French character Pierrot, whom Jean-Louis Barrault had just re-created in the film, "Les Enfants du Paradis" ("Children of Paradise," 1945). Pierrot in turn had his roots in the mime tradition of Italy's commedia dell'arte three centuries earlier.

By the late 1940s, Mr. Marceau had formed a company and created his most famous character, Bip, the white-faced, top-hatted everyman who constantly rediscovered the world with a childlike wonder. Bip eventually appeared in more than 100 vignettes.

By 1951, Mr. Marceau was a sensation in Paris and began performing in Israel, Italy and Scotland. In 1955, a two-week off-Broadway engagement became so popular that the show moved to Broadway for another two weeks. He toured other cities in the United States and Japan, then returned to New York in early 1956, where he played to capacity crowds.

His troupe, which disbanded in the mid-1960s, reopened as the Nouvelle Compagnie de Mimodrame Marcel Marceau, in the early 1990s after a subsidy from France's Culture Ministry.

His country named him a chevalier of its Legion of Honor in 1970, and in 2001, Mr. Marceau was chosen to be a U.N. goodwill ambassador for the older generation. In addition to his Paris flat, he had a 250-year-old farmhouse in the country just outside of Paris.

Two marriages, to Huguette Mallet and Ella Jaroszewicz, ended in divorce.

Survivors include his wife, Anne Sicco Marceau, and four children.