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.”

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 and even Jesus on the Cross.” 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.

After the Nazi invasion of France in 1940 the Mangel family left Strasbourg in packed trains, and Marceau continued his studies in Périgueux and Limoges, developing his gifts for the visual arts. Needing to change his name to something less Jewish, he chose that of the revolutionary general François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers. While still a teenager he joined the French underground with his brother Alain, using his drawing skills to forge identity cards for young Jewish children. Dressed as Boy Scouts, he and his brother led many to the Swiss frontier. “Sometimes I woke up sweating, thinking we were in front of a firing squad,” he once recalled. In March 1944 their father was arrested by the Gestapo in his butchery and taken to Auschwitz. Marceau never saw him again.

He spent the last months of the Occupation in La Maison de Sèvres, a children’s home near Paris, and among the pupils were 30 young Jews living under false names. Here, at the age of 20, Marceau performed amateur drama, creating a character called the Savage for their entertainment. Every Friday evening he would invent a new play, and on Saturdays he would imitate Chaplin. One of his performances was seen by a theatrical historian, who advised him to go to the drama school of Charles Dullin.

Dullin was a respected actor and director. At his school Marceau met the master of mime, Étienne Decroux, for whom Marceau created several pieces. The one he remembered most affectionately was The Ring, the story of a lazy beggar who finds a valuable ring and starts building castles in Spain. Then he meets a blind girl who sells flowers, gives her the ring and abandons his new wealth to work in a factory. It was based on Chaplin’s film City Lights.

After the liberation of Paris Marceau joined the French Army. Because he could speak English he served as liaison to the American forces, and after Germany’s surrender he spent much of his spare time in drama performances for French, British and American troops in Germany. He was demobilised in 1946 and joined the company of Jean-Louis Barrault. There he played the role of Arlequin in Baptiste at the Théâtre de Marigny. It was already clear to him, however, that his future lay in mime: his passion for gymnastics and his talent for silent imitation predisposed him to it. He tested the water with his first “mimodrama”, Praxiteles and the Golden Fish, the same year, and performed it to great acclaim at the Bernhardt Theatre.

Gaining confidence, he created Bip at the Théâtre de Poche, naming him for Pip in Great Expectations. Like the characters of Chaplin and Dickens, Bip was a small figure in an enormous world that was simultaneously wonderful and terrifying. Made by society to feel inferior, Bip is driven to rebellion. He reflects the radical views of his creator, as well as his ultimate optimism. “We know that the fighting spirit of man is everlasting,” Marceau explained. “Death is absurd, but humanity has to be eternal.”

Marceau toured Europe as Bip, then North and South America, India, Russia, Iran, Israel, Japan, the Cameroons, and Australia. Because his art was silent and visual and his themes were universal, Marceau was always able to communicate directly to every audience without barriers. The international succcess of Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean owes a great debt to Bip.

Although Bip was Marceau’s proudest creation, his repertoire was extensive, and it grew every year. He was especially fond of The Overcoat (based on Gogol’s story, Death Before Dawn), Don Juan, The Mask Maker and Birth, Maturity and Death. In the last of these he enacted the journey from cradle to grave in a few minutes.

He formed his Compagnie de Mime Marcel Marceau in 1949, and 20 years later opened his own International School of Mime in Paris, where he taught. He first visited the US in 1955-56 where his show at the Phoenix Theatre, New York, had to be moved to the Barrymore to accommodate the demand. He played to packed houses across the country and began to pick up television work in the US. Marceau did not guard his work jealously or worry about its intellectual integrity. His vignettes fitted in perfectly with the madcap Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and on children’s shows, and in the early 1970s he appeared five times on The Tonight Showwith Johnny Carson. His cinema roles, however, were arguably devoid of the subtlety and innocence that best defined him: in Barbarella (1968) he played the mad Professor Ping; in Shanks (1974), by the schlock-thriller director William Castle, he played a deaf-mute puppeteer who controls dead bodies like mannequins.

Rather better was First Class (1970), in which he played 17 different roles, and his fondly remembered cameo in Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie, in which his refusal to participate – “ Non!” - is the only word spoken in the film.

For the BBC he created a mime version of A Christmas Carol, filmed in a disused music hall in East London, which reflected his love of both Dickens and Chaplin. His screen work was never as successful as his work in the theatre, and his technique and powers of communication were always strongest in front of a live audience. He made 40 world tours.

Drawing and painting remained his favourite hobbies, and he published several books including the Marcel Marceau Alphabet Book and Marcel Marceau Counting Book for children. His true genius remained his rare ability, through mime, to express the essence of the human predicament, and his art always reflected the disturbing experiences of his youth. “As we go on in life, torn between light and shadow, encountering injustice, violence, misery, we still have one weapon against despair – to make people laugh through their tears.” He continued to speak passionately on his hatred of conflict and the need to keep working in later life. He revisited New York in 2002 with a new mimodrama, The Bowler Hat. He became a goodwill ambassador to the United Nations second world assembly on ageing in April 2002.

Marceau’s “walking against the wind” routine is believed to be the source of Michael Jackson’s moon-walk. Depite this, and the observance, from March 18, 1996, of Marcel Marceau Day in New York, Marceau had few protégés, and the silent art has, in much of the world, fallen once again out of favour.

Appreciation lasted longest in his native France, where he was appointed a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, Officer of the Ordre Nationale du Mérite, and a Commander of Arts and Letters of the French Republic. He won the Deburau Prize for Death Before Dawn, and two Emmy Awards for his television productions.

He was married three times and leaves two daughters and two sons.

Marcel Marceau, mime artist, was born on March 22, 1923. He died on September 22, 2007, aged 84