French mime artist Marcel Marceau dies at the age of 84

Wearing white face paint, soft shoes and a battered hat topped with a red flower, he conveyed the entire range of human emotions to audiences without uttering a word.

Offstage he was famously chatty.

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"Never get a mime talking. He won't stop," he once said.

For around 60 years, Marceau's lithe gestures and pliant facial expressions gave life to characters including a peevish waiter, a lion tamer and an old woman knitting.

He inspired countless performers - Michael Jackson borrowed his 'moonwalk' from a Marceau sketch, Walking Against the Wind.

Marceau, a Holocaust survivor, died in Paris on Saturday, according to his former assistant Emmanuel Vacca.

No details of the cause were given.

A French Jew, Marceau was born Marcel Mangel in 1923, in Strasbourg, eastern France.

His father Charles, a butcher, introduced his son to the world of music and theatre.

The boy adored the silent film stars of the era and Charlie Chaplin was his biggest inspiration.

When the Germans marched into eastern France, he and his family were given hours to pack their bags.

He fled to south-west France and changed his last name to Marceau to hide his Jewish origins.

In 1944, Marceau's father was sent to Auschwitz, where he died. Marceau worked with the French Resistance to protect Jewish children.

After Paris was liberated, he enrolled in drama school, studying with the mime Etienne Decroux.

On a tiny stage at the Theatre de Poche, a smoke-filled Left Bank cabaret, he sought to perfect his style of mime.

He created the character Bip, who - dressed in a sailor suit and hat

with a red rose on top - chased butterflies and flirted at parties.

In 1949, Marceau's newly-formed mime troupe was the only one of its kind in Europe.

He became an international star after a successful tour of the U.S. in the mid-1950s.

Single-handedly, Marceau revived mime. "I have a feeling that I did for mime what (Andres) Segovia did for the guitar, what (Pablo) Casals did for the cello," he once said.

Marceau married three times and had four children.