Irving Ravetch

Irving Dover Ravetch (November 14, 1920 – September 19, 2010) was an American screenwriter and film producer who frequently collaborated with his wife Harriet Frank Jr.

Early life Ravetch was born to a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Sylvia (Shapiro) and I. Shalom Ravetch, a rabbi. His mother was born in Palestine and his father in Ukraine. He gained his first screen credit with Living in a Big Way which was released the following year.

For the next decade, Ravetch worked mostly on Westerns such as Vengeance Valley (1951). With Frank, he approached producer Jerry Wald and proposed they adapt the William Faulkner novel The Hamlet (1940) for the screen. The result was The Long, Hot Summer (1958), which primarily was an original story with one of Faulkner's characters at its center. When Wald greenlighted the film and asked Ravetch to choose a director, he suggested Martin Ritt, whom he knew from the Group Theatre and the Actors Studio in New York City.