Background

Coppola was born in Detroit, Michigan on April 7, 1939. His father, Carmine, was a concert flutist who played with Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra. His mother, Italia, was an actress who at one time had appeared in films. Coppola's younger sister Talia would later follow in her mother's footsteps into the world of film acting, changing her name to Talia Shire and starring in the film Rocky alongside Silvester Stallone. A few years after his birth, Coppola and his family moved to the suburbs around New York City, where he would spend most of his childhood.

All the Coppola children were driven to succeed in show business and the arts. Leading by example was Coppola's father, who had achieved success as a musician for hire but longed to compose scores of his own. Francis seemed the least likely to redeem his father's promise, however. He was an awkward, myopic child who did poorly at school. At age nine, he was stricken with polio. The illness forced him into bed for a year, a period during which he played with puppets, watched television, and became lost in an inner fantasy world. After his recovery, he began to make movies with an eight-millimeter camera and a tape recorder.

Education

While a student at Great Neck High School on Long Island, Coppola began to study filmmaking more formally. He soon became enamored with the work of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. Coppola also trained in music and theater to round out his education. In 1956 he enrolled at Hofstra College in Hempstead, New York on a drama scholarship. Here he acted in and directed student productions, and founded his own cinema workshop. So determined was Coppola to direct his own pictures that he once sold his car to pay for a 16-millimeter camera.

After graduating from Hofstra, Coppola moved to the West Coast to attend film school at the University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA). But he was impatient to escape the classroom and start making his own films.

Career

During education, Coppola signed on to direct an adult movie, which caught the attention of low-budget impresario Roger Corman. Corman hired Coppola to work on his movies as a jack-of-all-trades. Coppola's strong work ethic prompted Corman to allow him to direct his own picture. The result was Dementia 13 (1963), a gory horror movie Coppola had written in three days and shot for $40,000.

Coppola submitted his next film, You're a Big Boy Now (1966), as his master's thesis at UCLA. The sweet coming-of-age drama anticipated the style and themes of The Graduate and received many positive reviews. Warner Brothers selected the promising young filmmaker to direct their big-budget musical Finian's Rainbow. But the subject matter took Coppola away from his strengths and the film was savaged by critics. The Rain People (1969) represented Coppola's attempt to return to "personal" (not to mention low-budget) moviemaking. A somber travelogue about a housewife on the run, the movie was made up as the crew went along, evidence of Coppola's flair for the experimental.

Coppola might have remained in an avant-garde rut were it not for his next project. As co-writer of the mega-hit biopic Patton, Coppola earned an Academy Award and added considerable luster to a tarnished reputation. Paramount Pictures next asked him to take the reins on its screen adaptation of Mario Puzo's best-selling novel The Godfather. It would prove to be Coppola's greatest triumph.

Filming The Godfather posed many challenges. Coppola fought hard to retain control of casting decisions. He also resisted studio attempts to cut his budget and make the setting more contemporary. Italian-American groups protested the depiction of organized crime in the original screenplay. Even Coppola's own crew at times lost faith in his ability to control the mammoth project. Nevertheless, he steered the movie to completion.

The Godfather tells the sweeping story of the Corleone crime family, focusing on the ascension of young Michael Corleone to control of the family's empire. It is a violent epic on the scale of classic American films like Gone with the Wind. Propelling the drama forward are powerful performances by Marlon Brando and newcomer Al Pacino. At its release in 1972, critics were floored by the film's depiction of America's criminal underworld. The film became a sensational hit with moviegoers as well, and The Godfather swept the Academy Awards that year. Coppola was a winner in the Best Director and Best Screenplay categories; suddenly he was the toast of Hollywood.

Now a wealthy man thanks to the success of The Godfather, Coppola could at last pick and choose his own projects. In 1974 he made The Conversation, an edgy drama about secret surveillance. He returned to the world of organized crime with 1974's The Godfather Part II, which continued the Corleone family saga through the 1950s and, via flashback, to the early 1900s. The intricate storyline resonated once again with critics and moviegoers alike. Coppola accepted a second Academy Award statuette as Best Director of 1974. The haunting score, by Nino Rota and family patriarch Carmine Coppola, also took home an "Oscar."

Coppola's next project was Apocalypse Now, an ambitious film about the Vietnam War. But the expensive production was bedeviled by bad weather, budget overruns, and the bizarre behavior of its star, Marlon Brando. The release date was pushed back repeatedly as Coppola struggled to come up with an ending for the film. When it finally reached the screen in 1979, the film was hailed by many critics as a visionary masterpiece. It was nominated for several Academy Awards and did well at the box office. But many in Hollywood never forgave Coppola for letting the project get so out of control. For many years, Coppola could not get funding from a major studio to make his movies.

Unable to make mainstream movies, Coppola instead crafted independent films which he released through his own Zoetrope Studio. These pictures, including Rumble Fish (1983) and The Cotton Club (1984), received mixed reviews and had many wondering if Coppola was a spent force in the industry. He did manage to create a hit with the offbeat Peggy Sue Got Married (1985), about a woman who travels back in time to her own high school days, but the project seemed like a work-for hire. Closer to Coppola's heart was Tucker: The Man and His Dream, a 1988 biopic about a maverick automaker who could have been a stand-in for the director himself.

In 1990 Coppola completed The Godfather Part III. While not in the same league as the first two films in the series, it did possess some merit. The cast included Pacino, Keaton, Andy Garcia, Talia Shire, Joe Mantegna, and Eli Wallach, but Coppola was taken to task by critics for replacing Winona Ryder with his daughter Sofia Coppola, who failed to rise to the challenge of her key part. (Notwithstanding this disappointment, she would go on become a successful film director in her own right.)

The moderate commercial success of The Godfather: Part III helped Coppola produce another big-budget film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). A florid, bloody, occasionally silly, violently erotic version of the oft-filmed tale, with eccentric Gary Oldman as the count and Ryder as his (possibly) reincarnated love, it was easily the most faithful and horrific version of Bram Stoker’s famous novel. It also returned Coppola, at long last, to bankability.

In Jack (1996), Robin Williams starred as a 10-year-old boy whose cells age him four times as fast as a normal person’s, making his interactions with other children extremely difficult. Based on a best-selling novel by John Grisham, The Rainmaker (1997) starred Matt Damon as a young attorney in Memphis whose idealism clashes with the greed of his ambulance-chasing boss. Although it was only a modest commercial success, The Rainmaker received positive reviews. Coppola then entered into a long fallow period, primary as a result of his embroilment in a legal dispute with Warner Brothers involving a three-picture deal for an adaptation of Pinocchio, the children’s classic The Secret Garden, and a biography of J. Edgar Hoover. In the end Coppola won a 1998 court judgment against the studio that awarded him $20 million for the studio’s abandonment of the project along with another $60 million in punitive damages.

In the wake of that protracted legal struggle, Coppola released Apocalypse Now Redux (2001), which contained more than 40 minutes of restored footage not seen in the original 1979 version. For much of the early 21st century, Coppola acted as an executive producer for others’ films, ran a winery, published a literary magazine, and continued to oversee his company American Zoetrope, which produced films and provided postproduction services. Throughout his career Coppola had produced many of the films he directed and, even when not directing, had many successes as a producer, including American Graffiti (1973), directed by George Lucas; The Black Stallion (1979), directed by Carroll Ballard; and Lost in Translation (2003), the film with which his daughter Sofia established herself as a director.

In 2007 he returned to directing with the self-financed Youth Without Youth, a fantastical drama based on a novella by Mircea Eliade about a septuagenarian Romanian professor (Tim Roth) who becomes decades younger when he is struck by lightning on the eve of World War II. After that film’s commercial failure, Coppola was on surer footing with Tetro (2009), about a teenager who travels to Argentina and reunites with his expatriate older half-brother. Although not a box-office success, the film (shot primarily in black and white) earned Coppola some of his best reviews in years. Twixt (2011), a thriller starring Val Kilmer, fared much less well critically and commercially.

For his achievements in film, Coppola was given the Irving Thalberg award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2010. In 2013 he received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for theatre/film.

Achievements

• Francis Coppola has been nominated for fourteen Academy Awards for his directing and writing. He has won six Academy Awards, three for writing, one as a director, one as a producer and one-lifetime achievement award. He was also nominated for ten Golden Globes, of which he won four. He is one of only eight filmmakers to win two Palm D'ors.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • Gardens Of Stone

    (A war-toughened sergeant (James Caan) passionately longs ...)

    1987
  • The Godfather Part II

    (The continuing saga of the Corleone crime family tells th...)

    1974
  • Dementia 13

    (Following the abrupt death of her husband from a heart at...)

    1963
  • One From The Heart

    (As a Las Vegas couple's relationship teeters on the brink...)

    1982
  • The Godfather

    (A chilling portrait of the Corleone family's rise and nea...)

    1972
  • Peggy Sue Got Married

    (Peggy Sue's long marriage to her former teen sweetheart i...)

    1986
  • Twixt

    (This terrifying horror film, from Oscar winner Francis Fo...)

    2011
  • Cotton Club

    (Francis Ford Coppola's lavish, 1930s-era epic comes to vi...)

    1984
  • Finian's Rainbow

    (Fred Astaire headlines an all-star cast in the big-screen...)

    1968
  • Rumble Fish

    (This is an unforgettable story of a young man's struggle ...)

    1983
  • Bram Stoker's Dracula

    (Based on Bram Stoker's classic and dark love story about ...)

    1992
  • Apocalypse Now

    (An Army captain's secret mission becomes a journey into m...)

    1979
  • The Rain People

    (Looking for a vacation from her marriage, pregnant Natali...)

    1969
  • Tucker: The Man and His Dream

    (A brilliant visionary of post-WWII America battles the 'b...)

    1988
  • You're A Big Boy Now

    (Bernard Chanticleer (Peter Kastner) is a very nice young ...)

    1966
  • The Rainmaker

    (Rudy Baylor (Matt Damon), a rookie lawyer, is in over his...)

    1997
  • The Conversation

    (Paranoid surveillance expert Harry Caul is hired to spy o...)

    1974
  • The Godfather Part III

    (One of the greatest sagas in movie history continues. In ...)

    1990
  • Youth Without Youth

    (A love story wrapped in a mystery. Set in Europe before W...)

    2007
  • Tetro 2009

Religion

Coppola’s heritage is fully Italian - and by association, fully Catholic. It influenced his films, explicitly such as in the Godfather trilogy where members of the Mafia often adhere to ancient and archaic Catholic traditions, mythology and symbology. But when asked about his religious views, Coppola responded: "I was raised as a Catholic, but I didn’t like the Catholic Church at all. I thought the nuns were mean."

Politics

Coppola is a confirmed Democrat. His financial political contributions are 100% Democrat, totaling $8,518.

Views

Quotations: "The essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense put together in a kind of alchemy."

"Your best idea or work is going to be attacked the most…So you have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas, because otherwise you'll just knuckle under and change it. And then things that might have been memorable will be lost."

Personality

Francis Coppola released his own line of specialty foods.

Interests

• technology, engineering

Connections

Francis Coppola married Eleanor Neil in 1963. Eleanor released a documentary based on the production problems faced by Apocalypse Now titled, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which was released in 1991. The Coppolas had three children together, Gian-Carlo, Roman, and Sophia Coppola. Sophia would act in some Coppola’s films and is an accomplished director herself. Gian-Carlo died in a car accident while still young.

Father:

Carmine Coppola

Mother:

Italia Coppola

Wife:

Eleanor Neil

Son:

Gian-Carlo Coppola

Son:

Roman Coppola

Daughter:

Sophia Coppola

Sister:

Talia Shire

nephew:

Nicolas Cage

colleague:

Marlon Brando

colleague:

Patrick Swayze

References

• Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life is the first complete picture of the internationally renowned and controversial cinematic genius who directed such films as the Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, and dozens more - some wildly successful, some utterly disastrous.
  1999
• Coppola Talking exclusively to Peter Cowie for this updated edition of the biography, Coppola looks back on the past twenty years and reflects on his much-cherished independence, as well as on the state of modern cinema.
  1989