Eleanor Coppola, the Emmy award-winning director, artist and writer, died Friday at her home in Rutherford, California, her family announced in a statement. She was 87.
Coppola, also known as a documentarian, won an Emmy award in 1992 for her film Hearts of Darkness, which chronicled the infamously tortured production of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now. She also directed romantic comedies Paris Can Wait (2016) and Love Is Love Is Love (2020).
Her visual art including photography, drawings and conceptual pieces have been exhibited in many galleries and museums globally, including a retrospective of her work at the Sonoma Valley art museum in 2014.
In addition to her own artistry, Coppola is remembered as the matriarch of a successful filmmaking family, raising with her husband Francis three children who entered the movie business. Francis Ford Coppola is perhaps best known for his film The Godfather (1972), which is widely considered a hallmark of the American gangster genre.
Eleanor Coppola, who grew up in Orange county, California, moved to Los Angeles to study at the University of California, Los Angeles. There, she met Francis while working as an assistant art director on his directorial debut, the Roger Corman-produced 1963 horror film Dementia 13. Within months of dating, Coppola became pregnant and the couple were wed in Las Vegas in February 1963.
Their first-born, Gian-Carlo, quickly became a regular presence in his father’s films, as did their subsequent children, Roman (born in 1965) and Sofia (born in 1971). After acting in their father’s films and growing up on sets, all would go into the movies.
“I don’t know what the family has given except I hope they’ve set an example of a family encouraging each other in their creative process, whatever it may be,” Eleanor Coppola told the Associated Press in 2017. “It happens in our family that everyone chose to sort of follow in the family business. We weren’t asking them to or expecting them to, but they did. At one point, Sofia said: ‘The nut does not fall far from the tree.’”
Gian-Carlo, who can be seen in the background of many of his father’s films and had begun doing second-unit photography, died at the age of 22 in a 1986 boating accident. He was killed while riding in a boat piloted by Griffin O’Neal, the son of Ryan O’Neal, who was found guilty of negligence.
Roman directed several movies of his own and regularly collaborates with Wes Anderson. He’s president of his father’s San Francisco-based film company, American Zoetrope.
Sofia became one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of her generation as the writer-director of films including Lost in Translation and the 2023 release Priscilla. Though the family did not offer a cause of death, Eleanor Coppola’s health had been in question; Sofia declined to attend the screening of Priscilla at the New York Film Festival in early October.
“I’m so sorry to not be there with you, but I’m with my mother, to whom this film is dedicated,” the writer-director wrote in a statement.
In joining the family business, the Coppola children weren’t just following in their father’s footsteps but their mother’s, too. Beginning on 1979’s Apocalypse Now, Coppola frequently documented the behind-the-scenes life of Francis’s films. The Philippines-set shoot of Apocalypse Now lasted 238 days. A typhoon destroyed sets. Martin Sheen had a heart attack. A member of the construction crew died.
Coppola documented much of the chaos in what would become one of the most famous making-of films about moviemaking, 1991’s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.
“I was just trying to keep myself occupied with something to do because we were out there for so long,” Coppola told CNN in 1991. “They wanted five minutes for a TV promotional or something and I thought sooner or later I could get five minutes of film and then it went on to 15 minutes.”
“I just kept shooting but I had no idea … the evolution of myself that I saw with my camera,” continued Coppola, who ended up shooting 60 hours worth of footage. “So, it was a surprise for both of us and a life-changing experience.”
In 1979, she published Notes: On the Making of ‘Apocalypse Now’. While the film focused on the film set tumult, the book charted some of Eleanor Coppola’s inner turmoil, including the challenges of being married to a larger-than-life figure. She wrote of being a “woman isolated from my friends, my affairs and my projects” during their year in Manila. She also frankly discusses Francis having an extramarital affair.
“There is part of me that has been waiting for Francis to leave me, or die, so that I can get my life the way I want it,” wrote Eleanor. “I wonder if I have the guts to get it the way I want it with him in it.”
They remained together, though, throughout her life. And Coppola continued to seek out creative outlets for herself. She documented several more of her husband’s films, as well as Roman’s CQ, and Sofia’s Marie Antoinette and The Virgin Suicides. She wrote a memoir in 2008, Notes on a Life.
In 2016, at the age of 80, Coppola made her narrative debut in Paris Can Wait, a romantic comedy starring Diane Lane. She followed that up with Love Is Love Is Love in 2020. Coppola had initially set out only to write the screenplay to Paris Can Wait.
“One morning at the breakfast table, my husband said: ‘Well, you should direct it.’ I was totally startled,” Coppola told AP. “But I said: ‘Well, I never wrote a script before and I’ve never directed, why not?’ I was kind of saying ‘why not?’ to everything.”
Coppola died just as her husband prepares a long-planned, self-financed epic, Metropolis, which will premiere next month at the Cannes film festival.
She is survived by her husband, Francis Ford Coppola; her son Roman and his wife, Jen, and their children, Pascale, Marcello and Alessandro; her daughter, Sofia, and her husband, Thomas, their children, Romy and Cosima; her granddaughter, Gia, and her husband, Honor, and their child, Beaumont; and by her brother, William Neil, and his wife, Lisa.
Coppola recently had completed her third memoir, the family said. In the manuscript she wrote:
“I appreciate how my unexpected life has stretched and pulled me in so many extraordinary ways and taken me in a multitude of directions beyond my wildest imaginings.”
