Google Celebrates Legendary Mime Marcel Marceau With Animated Doodle

Google has something worth celebrating to make an animated logo for.

The popular search company recently released a new animated Doodle logo to honor legendary mime Marcel Marceau on his 100th birthday.

The logo Google made to honor Marceau will stay up for the entirety of Mar. 22.

Marcel Marceau Life Details

Marcel Marceau, born Marcel Mangel, was born on Mar. 22, 1923, in Strasbourg, France. According to Google, he was born into a Jewish family, a fact that would force him to change his surname to Marceau following Nazi Germany's occupation of France during the onset of the Second World War.

The Encyclopedia Britannica mentioned that Marceau changed his surname to avoid being identified as Jewish and to fight against German occupiers as part of the French Resistance. Marceau's cousin, Georges, Loinger, a leader in the resistance, recruited him to help their efforts in safeguarding the free French and liberating France, per CNET.

However, before he became a resistance fighter, Marceau was a lover of the performing arts. In his childhood, Marceau was exposed to movies and dreamed of starring in silent films, which were all the rage in his time.

Marceau previously entertained his friend with impersonations of famous actors and even pantomimes, with him crediting Charlie Chaplin as his inspiration for becoming a mime. One of the famous actor's movies that Marceau watched with his mother at the age of 5 inspired him to take up the performing arts and become a mime.

However, time and Nazi Germany wouldn't be kind to Marceau and his family. Nazis arrested Charles Mangel, his father, and subsequently deported him to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he died in 1944 when Marceau was 21, per the New World Encyclopedia.

Marceau's Legacy

However, his father's death didn't deter Marceau in his mission to liberate France and save his few Jews from the clutches of the Third Reich. He used his acting and miming skills as a member of the resistance to entertaining Jewish children to keep them quiet and hidden from the Gestapo and French Police, who were rounding up Jews for deportation to the many Nazi concentration camps.

He also used his acting skills to smuggle children hiding in a French orphanage to the Swiss border due to the country's neutrality.

After the war, Marceau studied dramatic acting and mime at the School of Dramatic Art of the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Paris with pantomimist Etienne Decroux. However, his creation and portrayal of the character "Bip the Clown" was what made him iconic.

Bip the Clown is a tragicomic figure with a striped shirt, white face paint, and a battered beflowered hat who portrayed a range of human emotions through his actions, which spoke louder than words could thanks to Marceau's excellence in the pantomime field.

Marceau's success with Bip the Clown was significant enough for him to found the first pantomime company in the world, the Compagnie de Mime Marcel Marceau, to develop the art of silence. He went on tour and gave more than 15,000 performances over the next 50 years.

Marceau passed away on Sept. 22, 2007, at the age of 84, from a heart attack in his house in Calors, France.