For millions, “Jaws” mania never really waned, and no one knows that better than Wendy Benchley, whose late husband Peter wrote the 1974 thriller.

Although this weekend’s 50-year anniversary of the film’s release is reigniting interest in the Steven Spielberg-shot movie of the same name, Benchley has been living and breathing all things “Jaws” for much of her lifetime. As an ocean conservationist and policy advocate, she has traveled the world speaking out about protecting sharks and safeguarding the seas. Prior to her first husband’s death in 2006, the pair took part in diving expeditions and championed environmental causes.

Wendy Benchley is making the rounds this summer, and will be speaking at select screenings. This weekend’s “Jaws” extravaganza on Martha’s Vineyard, which is where the film was shot in 1974, will include screenings of National Geographic’s “Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story.” Benchley will also appear at a screening for the documentary at the Nantucket Film Festival, running Wednesday through June 30, as well as at a screening and talk on Thursday in Chatham, Mass. The European premiere of the documentary will take place on July 1 at the Oceanographic Institute in Monaco. European and U.K. media outlets regularly contact her about interviews and “they all understand the positive influence of ‘Jaws’ and how it really jump-started an interest in the conservation of sharks and the ocean, etc.,” she said.

In a recent interview with WWD, Benchley shared some back stories about how the book got written and how the summer blockbuster was made. It all stemmed from a chance encounter on Nantucket in 1963. “I was a hostess at the Jared Coffin House. Peter was at the bar there with a friend, smoking a Lucky Strike. I was helping a waitress get some drinks, and I was having a bit of a nicotine fit,” Benchley said. “I saw him sitting there, and I said, ‘Can I just have a quick drag of your cigarette?’ and he said, ‘Sure.’ I took a drag and gave it back to him. And then he came and asked me for a date. We got married a year later.”

As for why they hit it off so well, she said with a laugh, “Isn’t that the question of all of mankind? What are the pheromones that make you hit it off? I have no idea, but, definitely, we had sparks flying,” Benchley said.

Her late husband hailed from a family with a rich literary lineage. His grandfather Robert Benchley, a humorist, was a founder of the Algonquin Round Table, which included Dorothy Parker and other literary giants. He also worked in Hollywood as a film writer and performer. Peter Benchley’s father Nathaniel was a novelist, writer and a painter whose novel “The Off-Islanders” was turned into the movie “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.”

One summer on Nantucket the-then teenage Peter Benchley told his father how he really wanted to be a novelist or a writer, so they brokered a deal. Explaining to his son that he did not want him to face writer’s block in that pursuit, Nathaniel Benchley “offered to pay him what he would have made mowing lawns for the summer if he got up every morning at 7 a.m. and pounded away at the typewriter for four hours,” Wendy Benchley said.

His early career included writing for Newsweek and other magazines, as well as speechwriting for President Lyndon B. Johnson. His freelance years kicked off after Johnson decided not to run for re-election in 1968. Benchley set out to write a novel to earn a better living for his wife and two young children. Wendy Benchley said, “I look back at our decision. Of course, a novel is even riskier than freelance writing [laughs]. But we were young and foolish, so we thought, ‘OK, let’s go for it and see if he can hit a home run.”

He had two ideas in his back pocket — one about modern-day pirates, and the other about a great white shark wreaking havoc on a seaside community. Wendy Benchley said, “I must say, I said, ‘Oh Peter, I don’t think either of those are going to fly.’ Thank heavens he didn’t listen to me.”

But his editor at Doubleday, Tom Congdon, told Benchley, “’I think the fish story is a good one,’” Wendy Benchley said. “Peter pounded away writing in the Blackwell Furnace Repair Ship in Pennington, N.J. That was more conducive for writing than being in a house with two little toddlers running around.”

The backbone of the story was Benchley’s depiction and understanding of the ways that people “behave and react to a menace that they can’t control,” according to his widow. In addition, the time he had spent on Nantucket, where his parents had lived year-round at one point, made him grasp how reliant tradesmen and other locals are in summer communities on having strong summers businesswise. That tension enhanced the depth of character in the book.

And, of course, there was Benchley’s fascination with the great white shark, especially the 15- or 16-foot one that was caught off of Montauk Point in 1964 by Frank Mundus. That led Benchley to “put together this scenario with his imagination and his writing skills,” she said.

Spielberg featured a 25-foot great white replica “to make it more of a monster,” Wendy Benchley said. After learning more about “how magnificent and important sharks” were for the ocean following the film’s release, “Peter said he would not have made the shark quite as much of a dynamic killer as he did,” Wendy Benchley said. “But he was always very proud of his depiction of the great white shark — its swimming, senses and how they don’t have very good eyesight.”

So much so that sharks tend to bump swimmers with their noses “or take a bite of whatever is in front of them to see if that is worthy of them to eat.” Most of the time a shark will go away “after biting a human being, because we’re too bony. We don’t have enough fat like a nice seal,” she said.

During the filming of “Jaws,” which Benchley cowrote, the couple spent time on Martha’s Vineyard. “But he was so thrilled, when Carl Gottlieb was hired to do the day-to-day. Carl was brilliant at it, and he was there for the whole shoot. As you know, it was rather chaotic and exhausting,” Wendy Benchley said, adding that Peter Benchley was eager to get back to writing his next novel.

Once it was a wrap, they attended a preview of “Jaws” in a big theater in New York with Richard Dreyfuss, who played “Hooper,” the oceanographer. “Everybody in the audience just screamed, and they got up on their feet and cheered at the end,” Wendy Benchley said. “When we went out onto the sidewalk outside of the theater, Dreyfuss was just jumping up and down, saying, ‘I can’t believe it. We did it!’ Of course, he and everybody else had suffered through these four months of real hell trying to get this movie made.”

Lousy weather and the malfunctioning mechanical shark slowed down the proceedings. As well-constructed as the shark was, the salt water corroded it and its wiring, which resulted in it “constantly breaking down,” Wendy Benchley said. “But Steven says that meant that he had to do a lot more character development with the four lead actors, and also with the locals.”

Spielberg’s decision to screen it with members of the diving community like Stan Waterman, Ron and Valerie Taylor and Peter Gimbel also boded well, she said. Scared as some movie fans were by “Jaws,” applications to study marine science at the Rosenfeld School increased by 30 percent right after “Jaws,” as well as at other schools, Wendy Benchley said.

“People say that ‘Jaws’ kept people out of the water and made them fear sharks. That’s true for maybe 5 percent or 10 percent, but the other 90 or 95 percent were fascinated with sharks and research. Fifty years later people are still interested in this iconic fish, and they want to conserve sharks and keep our ocean healthy.”

“Honored and thrilled” as Peter Benchley would have been that people still found his book and the movie “fascinating and exciting” 50 years later, he knew what a positive effect “Jaws” had, during his lifetime, Wendy Benchley said. Having received numerous letters, he also did expeditions and wrote articles about oceanography for National Geographic, among other outlets. “This interest has been going on for 50 years. It’s not just now,” said Wendy Benchley, who “loves” that people still jump off the “‘Jaws’ bridge” into the water on Martha’s Vineyard as a summer ritual.

Stressing the importance of not conflating “Jaws” with sharks being decimated around the world for shark fin soup and shark meat, Wendy Benchley said, “’Jaws’ had nothing to do with that. Shark-fin soup has been eaten in Asian cultures for millennium. Sharks are in trouble all over the world, because of these huge factory ships and the fact that too many people are having shark-fin soup for celebration [including weddings] and shark meat to eat,” Wendy Benchley said. “We are still killing more than 100 million sharks each year for shark-fin soup and their meat.”