I came to the acting business quite late in life compared with most people, as I was working as a hairdresser first. I grew up in a small town in Waterford, and grew up with no theatre in my life. The first time I'd ever seen street theatre was when I went to Paris for a weekend in my early 20s. The street theatre I saw being performed was mime, and it was the most magical thing I had ever seen. I didn't even know up to then that you could learn something like that, and I was drawn to it because to me, it was storytelling without words. And Marcel Marceau was the great master of it all.

His background was that he was born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg in 1923. He was Jewish, and he joined the army, but his family had to leave their home during World War II. His father was arrested and died in the concentration camp in Auschwitz. Having been inspired by Charlie Chaplin, after the war, Marceau enrolled in Charles Dullin's School of Dramatic Art in Paris. He established his career as a mime artist, and with his black and white striped top and battered, silk opera hat, became best known for his silent character, 'Bip' the clown. He established the Compagnie de Mime Marcel Marceau in 1949, and it played all of the leading Paris theatres and those around the world.

Marceau was always striving to keep the art of mime alive, and he established his own school in Paris in 1978, Ecole Internationale de Mimodrame de Paris, Marcel Marceau. He also encouraged a lot of other schools, like Jacques Lecoq's school, which a lot of Irish people went to.

After my experience in Paris, I became interested in mime myself, and I got pretty good at it, even though I hadn't been trained. I used to go out and do street theatre in the form of 'robotic' work, on Grafton street, often late at night, with all sorts of shenanigans going on around me. Even though I was nervous, doing it was heaven for me, and it was years before anybody else was out there doing it, apart from Thom McGinty, the Diceman.

Just around that time, Vincent O'Neill and Conal Kearney came back from doing the three-year course at the Marceau school, and they were the first Irish people to do so. They started the Oscar Mime Company, and I leapt at the chance of learning from them. I loved it, and as they were Marceau people, he became even bigger than I had even imagined him to be. They loved him as well, and spoke of him as a most exquisite artist, so he just became a god to me at that stage.

I saw him performing in the Olympia theatre in the mid '80s, and he was wonderful. Having built him up in my mind for so long, he didn't let me down one bit, which was amazing, and it was so romantic for me.

Marceau made many television appearances, and won an Emmy for his performance on the Max Liebman Show of Shows. He had previously been awarded the renowned Deburau Prize in 1949, for second mimodrama, Death before Dawn. He also appeared in many films, including First Class, and Shanks, and he had a speaking role as the mad scientist, Professor Ping, in Barbarella. He was also a very talented artist, and wrote two children's books, the Marcel Marceau Alphabet Book and the Marcel Marceau Counting Book. Other works included La Ballade de Paris et du Monde, The Story of Bip, and Bip in a Book. He established the Marceau Foundation to promote mime in the US, and also started a full company production, Les Contes Fantastique, (Fantasy Tales). If you were to ask anyone on the business what they thought of him, they couldn't deny that he was the great master, even if mime wasn't their cup of tea. The pity about it, and one of the things that probably turned me away from mime for a while, was that when you do something that well, you tend to spawn a whole load of people who are never going to reach that same standard. The world became littered with people in stripy tee-shirts and berets, trying to look like a French mime artist. There is so much poor quality stuff out there, which gives the discipline a bad name, and even today, you can walk down Grafton Street and see the people doing 'stillness' stuff . . .

and there is no comparison between them and people like Thom McGinty.

In his personal life, Marceau was married and divorced three times, and had two sons and two daughters. He was 84 when he died last month of a heart attack in his house in Cahors, France. His Times obituary said that "his true genius remained his rare ability through mime, to expressing the essence of the human predicament, and his art always reflected the disturbing experiences of his youth, " and I would completely agree with that.

This year in particular, I have returned to non-verbal theatre, because I'm been re-ignited by a passion for it again. I had to push aside the mime stuff along the way to pursue another route, but now I've come back in a more mature way to realising that this guy, Marcel Marceau, really was the master of mime.