US director Eleanor Coppola, who was married to Oscar winner Francis Ford Coppola (85) for more than 60 years, is dead. She died on Friday in Rutherford, northern California, the family announced. The California native was 87 years old. The family was at her side, they said. She was the mother of director Sofia Coppola (52, “Lost in Translation”) and filmmaker Roman Coppola (58). The couple’s first son, Gian Carlo, died in a boating accident in 1986 at the age of 22.
As a young arts and crafts student, she met Coppola in 1962 while filming his first film, “Dementia 13,” and they married a year later. She often accompanied the director of global hits such as “Apocalypse Now” and the “Godfather” trilogy to filming locations, for example in the Philippine jungle for the war epic “Apocalypse Now” (1979). Eleanor Coppola captured the nerve-racking production with the main actors Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen in her documentary “Journey into the Heart of Darkness”.
At the age of 80, the matriarch of the film clan made her first feature film, for which she also wrote the script. Alec Baldwin and Diane Lane starred in the romantic road movie “Paris Can Wait” (2016). The drama “Love Is Love Is Love” followed in 2020.
