Michael Meyer (2) (1921–2000)

Michael Meyer was born to a Jewish family in London, England. His parents were Nora and Percy Barrington Meyer, a timber merchant, and he had two brothers, Peter and Richard. His mother Nora died of influenza when he was seven years old. He was educated at Wellington College in Berkshire and at Oxford University, where he read English. There he became a close friend of his classmate Sidney Keyes, a poet. Initially a conscientious objector during World War II, Meyer served as a civilian with Britain's Bomber Command for three years. In 1946, he edited the posthumous Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes, which contained previously unpublished poems along with memoirs by Meyer, artist Milein Cosman, and James Lucas, a war comrade. Meyer became a lecturer in English at Uppsala University in Sweden from 1947 to 1950. His first translation of a Swedish work into English was the novel The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson in 1954. This led BBC Radio to invite Meyer to translate Henrik Ibsen's Little Eyolf, although his understanding of Norwegian at the time of the commission was limited. He was then asked by director Caspar Wrede for English versions of the Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea and John Gabriel Borkman for television productions. Meyer eventually translated all of Ibsen's 16 major plays, as well as 18 of August Strindberg's plays. These won him an international reputation as a specialist in Scandinavian literature. Meyer's three-volume biography of Ibsen was published in 1967 and won the Whitbread Biography Award. His biography of Strindberg was published in 1985, and was awarded the Gold Medal from the Swedish Academy. Meyer published one novel, The End of the Corridor (1951), and several original plays for stage and radio, including The Ortolan (1953); Lunatic and Lover, which won an Edinburgh Fringe First in 1978; and A Meeting in Rome (1991). Meyer was a visiting professor at several American universities including UCLA and Dartmouth. He taught at the Central School of Drama in London and was on the board of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). He was appointed a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1971 and Knight Commander of the Order of the Polar Star in Sweden in 1977. He published his memoirs, Not Prince Hamlet, in 1989.