Grandson of famed humorist and actor
Robert Benchley and the son of highly
respected children's books author
Nathaniel Benchley, novelist Peter
Benchley's book were decidedly more dramatic in their content and style
than his father's, and usually centered on the world's oceans as a
backdrop to his vigorous plots.
Benchley is of course best remembered for penning the multi-million
selling thriller Jaws, which was eventually filmed by director
Steven Spielberg starring
Roy Scheider,
Richard Dreyfuss and
Robert Shaw.
Der weiße Hai (1975) was a box office sensation,
becoming one of the seminal films of the 1970s, spawning several
inferior sequels, numerous low budget copycat films starring
hammerheads, tiger and mako sharks. Plus generations of swimmers chose
backyard pools over the mysterious ocean surf for cooling off in
summer.
Benchley also wrote The Deep and The Island which were also both
brought to the screen, but with much less fanfare and box office return
than the Jaws venture. Interestingly, after the enormous hysteria
created over the great white shark and their alleged man-eating habits,
Benchley became a dedicated environmentalist committed to learning all
he could about one of the world's most amazing apex predators. In the
ensuing years, Benchley became one of the great white shark's greatest
defenders and publicly admitted on numerous occasions that with what he
now knew about the fragility of the species, he would have never
written a book like Jaws which demonised the great white.
Benchley kept very active in his passion for studying great whites up
until the time of his death from pulmonary fibrosis on February 11th,
2006.
