Born in Strasbourg, the son of a Jewish butcher, Marcel Mangel moved with his family to Lille at the age of 4, and here he began to develop his enthusiasm for gymnastics and drawing. When playing with other children, he said, "my imagination was king. I was Napoleon, Robin Hood, the Three Musketeers..." He liked to speak of his childhood, and everything else, in florid terms, and off-stage was a garrulous interviewee. "Never get a mime talking," he once told a journalist. "He won't stop." His family returned to Strasbourg, where he discovered two of his other lifelong passions, both of them English: Charlie Chaplin and Charles Dickens. Apeing Chaplin, he sometimes wandered the city's streets in his father's bowler hat, big black trousers and oversized shoes. One of his aunts ran a summer school in a village outside Strasbourg, where he studied. As the outlook in Germany became bleaker, his mimicry of Chaplin turned into mockery of Hitler. Marcel Marceau single-handedly resurrected the art of mime, reinterpreting it for jaded postwar audiences and elevating it to a universal language. One critic said of "l'art du silence" which he created: "He accomplishes in less than two minutes what most novelists cannot do in volumes." Marceau will be best remembered as the creator of Bip, the mime clown with a white face, tattered shoes and a top hat with a flower in it. "Bip was born in the imagination of my early years," Marceau wrote, "and always surrounded by characters who are neither better nor worse than himself. He is a romantic and burlesque hero of our time, and he is also my alter ego, struggling like Don Quixote against the windmills in the battlefields of life."