from Wilipedia

A mime artist is someone who uses mime as a theatrical medium or as a performance art.

Mimes in film

Silent film comedians like Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton learned the craft of mime in the theatre but through film had a profound influence on mimes who work in live theatre even decades after their death. Indeed, Chaplin may be the best documented mime in history.

The famous French comedian, writer and director Jacques Tati achieved his initial popularity working as a mime, and indeed his later films had only minimal dialogue, relying instead on many subtle expertly choreographed visual gags. Tati, like Chaplin before him, would mime out the movements of every single character in his films and ask his actors to repeat them.

Mimes have often appeared in science fiction and fantasy films. The physical training of the mime when combined with a well designed costume can result in a fantastic, yet believable creature. In this regard, the distinction between mime and puppeteer has become blurred. More recent developments in computer animation such as motion capture or mocap technology allow for actors' movements to be used in creating animated characters. As a result, some mimes are beginning to work with animators in creating characters.

Mimes have also been portrayed in film, most notably in Les Enfants du Paradis, which featured both Jean-Louis Barrault in the role of Jean-Gaspard Deburau and Decroux as his father. However, when mimes are portrayed in film, it is just as common for filmmakers to have actors with little mime training to perform a stereotype of a mime as it is for a skilled artist to either perform or choreograph the performance on screen.

Mime

Mime (Gk. mimos, Lat. mimus). Originally a Greek word meaning 'a mimic', the term came to be applied in Greece to a dramatic sketch presenting a scene from daily life ('the quack doctor' ) or myth ('Dionysus and Ariadne' ). In the fifth century BC Sophron of Syracuse wrote mimes in some kind of rhythmic prose and popular (Doric) language; a papyrus fragment and some quotations survive. Sophron was perhaps the first to give mime a literary form, was admired by Plato, and probably influenced Herodas and Theocritus.

At Rome the name was applied to a kind of dramatic performance introduced there before the end of the third century BC, perhaps from Magna Graecia. The actors included both men and women, who acted in bare feet and without masks scenes from everyday life or from romance, spoken in prose. Mime gradually ousted the Atellan farce as a tail piece or finale (exodium) after tragedies. It developed into licentious farce, with stock characters of husband, faithless wife, her lover, and the maid. A popular feature of the ludi Florales was the appearance of actresses, mimae, naked. The mime took a literary form in the first century BC. The principal writers then were D. Laberius and Publilius Syrus, who included elements of social and political criticism. Under the empire, mimes contributed to the decline in stage performances of comedy, being patronized by the emperors and highly popular with the people, who loved their farcical nature, indecency, and topicality. They were finally suppressed in the Roman world in AD 502.

Mime in the ancient world should not be confused with 'mime' in the modern sense, which signifies a play in which the parts are performed by gesture and action alone, without words, and to the accompaniment of music. For this see PANTOMIME.