Eleanor Coppola, Emmy-winning filmmaker and Francis Ford Coppola's wife, dies at 87
Filmmaker Eleanor Coppola, the matriarch of a family of Hollywood heavyweights who directed an Emmy-winning documentary about the creation of husband Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Oscar-winning film "Apocalypse Now," has died.
A representative for Coppola told USA TODAY that Coppola died Friday at age 87 inside her Rutherford, California, home while "surrounded by her loving family."
She and "The Godfather" writer/director Ford Coppola were married in 1963, a year after the two met on the set of his first feature film, the low-budget black-and-white horror film "Dementia 13," and enjoyed 61 years of marriage.
Together, they had three children — Gian-Carlo (“Gio”) Coppola, who died at 22 years old in a boating accident, as well as filmmakers Roman Coppola, who earned an Oscar nomination as one of the screenwriters for the 2012 Wes Anderson film "Moonrise Kingdom," and Sofia Coppola, whose screenplay for "Lost in Translation" earned her an Academy Award in 2003.
Coppola and Ford Coppola's "marriage was utterly infused with art and film and family, and their work overlapped in profound ways," reads an obituary shared by her publicist.
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Beginning with the Emmy-winning "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse," Coppola made several documentaries that showed the behind-the-scenes of films directed by her family. Her most recent project involved editing a documentary about daughter Sofia Coppola's 2006 film "Marie Antionette," which starred Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Rose Byrne and Jamie Dornan.
In 2017, Coppola debuted her first feature film, "Paris Can Wait," at age 81. She wrote and directed the rom-com, starring Diane Lane, Alec Baldwin and Arnaud Viard. She followed this with 2020's "Love Is Love Is Love."
Her creative energy went beyond the screen as Coppola also wrote two books and created artwork, ranging from illustrations to photography to large-scale installations, that has been exhibited around the world.
According to her obituary, Coppola just completed her third book, which chronicled the recent events of her life. 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.”