Clown Dimitri, beloved Swiss performer, dead at 80
GENEVA — Clown Dimitri, a beloved Swiss clown and mime over nearly six decades who studied under Marcel Marceau and spread smiles from Broadway to Congo with a traditional style that shunned modern, high-tech theatrics, has died, his office said Wednesday. He was 80.
Dimitri died Tuesday at his home in Borgnone in the southern Ticino region next to Italy, said Verena Graf of the “Clown Dimitri Secretariat” by phone. She said she did not know the cause of death, but he had not been ill, and she had seen him two days ago.
A man of few words in white-face on stage in a country with four official languages, Dimitri spoke to audiences by combining naive, bumbling humour with acrobatics and skill at a vast repertoire of musical instruments. His was elemental, no-frills, old-school clowning that is set to carry on with a theatre, school, museum and troupe known as “La Famiglia Dimitri.”
Jakob Dimitri was born in 1935 in the nearby village of Ancona, and at age 7 knew that he wanted to become a clown. In 1958, he trained under and befriended the French great Marceau, Dimitri’s self-avowed idol, and a year later performed his own show.