Marcel Marceau, the world's best-known mime artist who for decades moved audiences across the globe without uttering a single word, has died aged 84.

The Frenchman's extensive tours and appearances on camera brought his silent art to people around the world. His comic and tragic sketches appealed on a universal level, with each audience interpreting his performance in its own way.

"Mime, like music, knows neither borders nor nationalities," he once said. "If laughter and tears are the characteristics of humanity, all cultures are steeped in our discipline."

On stage, he charmed with his deft silent movements, a white-faced figure with a striped jersey and battered top hat.

Off stage, with the costume and the pancake makeup removed, Mr Marceau was a slim, agile man whose eloquent description and explanation complemented his mute mastery of mime.

In mime, Mr Marceau said, gestures express the essence of the soul's most secret aspiration. "To mime the wind, one becomes a tempest. To mime a fish, you throw yourself into the sea."

He created the figure of Bip, the melancholy, engaging clown with a limp red flower in his hat, 60 years ago this year.

"The mime Marceau will forever be the character of Bip," Prime Minister Francois Fillon said in a statement confirming the performer's death.

"He became one of the best-known French artists in the world. His students and the showbusiness world will miss him."

The exact cause of his death was not immediately known. Mr Marceau traced his ancestry back through US silent film greats Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to the clowns of the Commedia dell'Arte, a centuries-old European tradition, and to the stylised gestures of Chinese opera and Japan's Noh plays.

Marceau was born in the Alsatian town of Strasbourg on March 22, 1923. He was brought up in Lille, where his father was a butcher. When World War II came, his father was taken hostage and later killed by the invading Nazis and in 1944 Marcel joined his elder brother in the Resistance.