5. After Using His Miming Skills to Save Children, Marcel Marceau Used them to Become a Global Star
Marcel Marceau’s mime skills were not only good enough to save children from the Holocaust, but to also made him a star. After the Allies landed in France, Marceau gave his first major performance before an audience of 3000 soldiers in a liberated Paris. He then joined the Free French army for the rest of the war. His talent for languages and near fluency in English and German got him appointed as a liaison officer embedded with George Patton’s Third US Army.
After the war, Marceau had a long and eventful career. His accomplishments included winning an Emmy Award, and getting declared a national treasure in Japan despite not being Japanese. He also became a member of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts and forged a decades-long friendship with Michael Jackson, who borrowed some of Marceau’s moves in his dance routines. In 2020, Resistance, a biographical drama about his life, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Marceau, was released.
