My father, David Mayer, who has died aged 94, was a theatre historian and professor of drama. He brought together film and theatre scholars and transformed their understanding of early cinema and the Victorian and Edwardian stage.
At 6ft 3in, he was a towering figure in every way, and always chose humour over decorum. It may not be a coincidence that so many of his students (and I) found their way into comedy – including Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson and Meera Syal.
David liked to describe himself as a Jewish cowboy. His childhood summers were spent in Colorado, where he learned to ride and rope cattle, but he primarily grew up on the affluent north shore of Chicago, as the eldest son of Red Mayer, the proprietor of the clothing store where Al Capone bought his trademark Borsalino hats, and Jane Mayer, a writer of romantic fiction.
He attended New Trier high school in Winnetka, Illinois, then Yale, where he majored in English literature and was in the swimming team. After graduation, he somehow managed to spend his military service making training films in New York, where he got into a fight with Frank Sinatra.
In 1954 he married a fellow Chicagoan, Anne Goodkind, and they had three daughters, Cassandra, Catherine and me. A PhD in dramatic literature and theatre history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and an early post as associate professor of theatre and drama at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, led to a Guggenheim fellowship that brought our family to London for a year in 1963, while he researched early 19th-century English pantomime and published the first of many books.
On his return, life in a small midwestern town felt stifling so we upped sticks and boarded the Queen Elizabeth for the week-long Atlantic crossing.
The University of Manchester offered David his first permanent post in the UK in 1972 as a lecturer in drama. There, his scholarly interest began encompassing melodrama, hippodrama and other popular theatre forms of the 19th century. It was also where, following my parents’ divorce in 1978, he fell in love with Helen Day, and where they made their home from 1980 (marrying in 1991), although my father remained a proud American citizen.
As emeritus professor and research professor after his retirement from teaching in 1996, he continued to write and publish extensively until his death. He was never happier than in his study, surrounded by his books and vast collection of theatre and film memorabilia. He was quietly thrilled when, in 2012, the American Society for Theatre Research awarded him their Distinguished Scholar Award.
He is survived by Helen, Cassie, Catherine and me, and his grandson, Isaac.
