I took note of the announcement on the Sunday Morning news show that Marcel Marceau had died. They featured an interview they'd done of him twenty years ago. How I would have loved to sketch from paused scenes of that! His face was so animated, so vital.

But I wasn't able to find that online. Even tiny, I would have used it. But I did find photos from which to sketch.

I confess, I don't always understand mime. Youtube has a nice montage of him, which I enjoyed. But I don't quite get a mime play he and others did in 1995, though. I would have liked to have seen him in action live. I suspect more videos will turn up now that he's passed on.

Yet he's more than a mime legend, he also played an important role in history, as I learned from the Washington Post:

"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, Marceau changed his name and became active in the French underground, altering identity cards, and, masquerading as a Boy Scout director leading a hike in the Alps, he smuggled hundreds of Jewish children into Switzerland."

(Drawing took 29 minutes, no digital fixes!)