director producer screenwriter actress
Ethnicity:
Coppola is of Lucanian and Neapolitan descent by her father's side.
Coppola was born on May 14, 1971, in New York City, the youngest child and only daughter of filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and Eleanor Jessie Neil. She was raised on her parents' farm in Rutherford, California. Coppola lost her older brother, Gio, when she was fifteen. He was twenty-two when he was killed in a boating accident.
Coppola graduated from St. Helena High School in 1989. She later attended Mills College and the California Institute of the Arts.
Eleanor Coppola, Sofia's mother, produced Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, a documentary about the making of her husband's Apocalypse Now. Their daughter was with them in the jungle as that film was completed, as she was during most of her father's projects. With the making of The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, both of which were critically acclaimed, Sofia Coppola has also become a filmmaker with her own distinct style.
Coppola, who has acted in a variety of films, made her first professional appearance as Vito Corleone's newborn grandson in the baptismal scene in The Godfather. In the sequel, she was a child on a steamship. She appeared in more of her father's films, including The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, and Peggy Sue Got Married. During the filming of The Godfather: Part III, actress Winona Ryder fell ill with the flu, and Coppola was called on to fill in and play the part of Mary Corleone. Her work in the film was criticized, and she abandoned acting to concentrate on her other interests, including fashion design, photography, and writing. She had already collaborated with her father in writing "Life without Zoe," a segment in the anthology film New York Stories, and she also created the costuming for their contribution.
Coppola was a co-creator of the television series High Octane, a news magazine for Comedy Central. After it was discontinued, she contributed to her brother Roman's music video projects. After reading Jeffrey Eugenides's 1993 novel, The Virgin Suicides, Coppola began writing a screenplay based on the story. Muse Productions, which had bought the rights, scrapped their more violent and sexual version and used Coppola's. With production assistance from her father and mother, the haunting tale of teenage sexuality set in the 1970s was completed with a cast that includes James Woods and Kathleen Turner as the repressive parents of five beautiful daughters who commit suicide and whose lives are seen through the eyes of the boys who desire them. The cast also includes Josh Hartnett, Hayden Christensen, and Kirsten Dunst. The film premiered at Cannes to critical acclaim and was then picked up by Paramount Classics.
She was the third woman, and first American woman, to be nominated for an Academy Award for best director for her very personal Lost in Translation. Although she didn't take home that Oscar, she did win one for her screenplay, as well as an impressive number of Independent Spirit and Golden Globe Awards. Starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, the film was shot in Japan, much of it in the Tokyo Park Hyatt Hotel, in just twenty-seven days, on a $4 million budget, with a crew that for the most part didn't speak English.
The film was shot mostly at night because the two central figures are insomniacs. Coppola convinced Bill Murray to play Bob Harris, an aging American film star who is in Tokyo to shoot an ad for a Japanese whiskey distiller. He also agrees to do a public appearance on a Japanese television show and so delays his trip home to his children and his nagging wife.
Several reviewers praised the movie's soundtrack. Of its overall impression, Christian Century's Steve Vineberg wrote that at first, he "found the picture unsatisfying. The scenes felt like beads on a string; they didn't link up. But the movie got under my skin, and I kept rerunning scenes in my head. So I went back to check it out. I discovered that the links of the story are indeed there, only they're not typical cause-and-effect connections. They're formed by the emotions that gather at the end of one episode and pour into the next - emotions shaped by the restlessness and unidentified longing of these two people."
Coppola directed The Beguiled (2017), a remake of the 1971 eponymous Southern Gothic film, starring Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning, and Kirsten Dunst. The film premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, where Coppola became the second woman (and the first American woman) to win the Best Director award.
Coppola again worked with Bill Murray on the film, On the Rocks, starring Murray and Rashida Jones.
(An electrifying yet intimate re-telling of the turbulent ...)
2006(A seen-better-days American actor and a newly married wom...)
2003Coppola has had to deal with sexism in the industry, and her quintessentially feminine work has been dismissed as decorative and insubstantial. She has said that she is proud of the more "girly" aspects of her work and that she feels that she has a feminine point of view that she is happy to project. She has cited her upbringing around so many strong men as a possible reason for her strong connection to femininity. She has been open about her experiences with sexism in the industry and has cited them as a reason she favors working in the independent realm.
Coppola has also said that big budget productions hinder her creative freedom, and so she prefers to work on films she can control. She has also criticized big studio production for its focus on business rather than art.
Interviewers describe Sofia Coppola's films as dreamy or dreamlike. They use the same words to describe Coppola the filmmaker. Still a shy, quiet person, Coppola seems uncomfortable in the spotlight of her new-found fame. According to Anthony Breznican, who interviewed her in 2004, she is "polite, pensive and as unpolished" as the character of Charlotte in Lost in Translation. She is also eager to move on to her next film, which is expected to be about the life of Marie Antoinette, the notorious eighteenth-century queen of France.
In 1992, Coppola met director Spike Jonze; they married in 1999 and divorced in 2003. She married musician Thomas Mars on August 27, 2011, at Palazzo Margherita in Bernalda, Italy. They have two daughters: Romy, whose name is an homage to Coppola's brother Roman, and Cosima.
Coppola is also the cousin of actors Nicholas Cage and Jason Schwartzman.
Coppola is an American documentary filmmaker, artist, and writer.
