He is the award-winning writer famed for tough-guy dramas like Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed the Plow. She was an attic-bound teenage girl, whose handwritten journal became one of the most potent symbols of the horrors of the Holocaust. Now, in an unlikely literary partnership, the American playwright David Mamet has agreed to write, produce and direct a Disney film of The Diary of Anne Frank.

The project, revealed this week, will combine material from a 1950s stage play with what Variety describes as Mamet's "own original take" on Anne Frank's account of the 25 months her family spent holed-up in their secret canal-side attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during the second world war.

Anne's diary, which has sold 25 million copies, is regard­ed as one of the greatest books of the 20th century. It was first published in 1947, two years after its author died, aged 15, at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Mamet is expected to pitch the story, which has previously inspired dozens of TV, film and stage adaptations, as a coming-of-age drama. Variety predicted yesterday that his script will: "reframe the story as a young girl's rite of passage".

As a result, the film, scheduled for release in 2011, is likely to focus not just on Anne Frank's observations about the Holocaust and the monotony of life in the confined surroundings where her family was hidden, but also on some of the episodes in her story that touch on universal themes of teenage existence.

Much of the appeal of the book, which was originally titled The Diary of a Young Girl, comes from the manner in which it renders its 13-year-old narrator's raging adolescent hormones, and her relationship with a young refugee called Peter Van Pels who was also hiding in the attic. Several passages of the original text are thought to have revealed the young couple had sex on several occasions, without their parents' knowledge. However, explicit scenes were reportedly edited from the published version at the instruction of Anne's father, Otto, who was the sole member of the family to survive the Holocaust.

Since Otto Frank's death in 1980, the Anne Frank Estate has jealously guarded the rights to her story, refusing to endorse an ABC series about it in 2001. Sensitivities surrounding that issue may have contributed to the fact it took more than a year of negotiation by Mamet's co-producer, Andrew Braunsberg, to get approval from the Anne Frank Estate. He also cut a deal with the estates of Albert Hackett and Frances Good­rich, who co-wrote the original play.