Francis Ford Coppolahas been in the news a lot recently, with speculation and anticipation swirling aroundhis long-anticipated epicMegalopolis, but sadly, he’s in the news for a different reason today. His wife of 61 years,Eleanor Coppola, passed away at age 87 on April 12 at their home in Rutherford, California.
Born Eleanor Jessie Neil in 1936, Eleanor met Francis on the set of the latter’s legitimate directorial debut, the Roger Corman horror film,Dementia 13. She was an assistant art director, and he was a budding filmmaker just getting his start; she was 26, and he was 23.They would go on to birth a filmmaking empire, parenting Roman Coppola (CQ, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III) and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, Priscilla). Their nephews are Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman, and their granddaughter is director and actor Gia Coppola (Palo Alto, Mainstream).
“I never expected Francis to be a celebrity when we got married. He was making this black-and-white film, very low budget. I thought we were going to live in the [San Fernando] Valley,” said Eleanor Coppola in an interview with theLos Angeles Timesin 2008. “I was just as startled and unprepared for how our lives evolved.”
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse
Eleanor Chronicled the Madness of Apocalypse Now in Hearts of Darkness
Eleanor and Francis Ford Coppola would endure perhaps the greatest test of their marriage and their careers during the production ofApocalypse Now, the Oscar-winning masterpiece about the Vietnam War starring Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando. What began as a five-month shoot turned into a 14-month-long nightmare in which seemingly everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
Eleanor directed a making-of documentary (as she also did with several other films), not realizing that it would become an essential study of film history, Murphy’s Law, and utter madness.Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypsebecame one of the best documentaries of all time, and won her an Emmy Award.
Even in her later years, in her 80s, she would go on to direct two romance films, both of which she wrote. The first,Paris Can Wait, stars Diane Lane as a woman whose vacation gets interrupted when her movie producer husband (Alec Baldwin) has to leave, resulting in a road trip with his charming producing partner (Arnaud Viard). She then directedLove Is Love Is Love, a triptych romantic drama with a big cast.
Coppola will be dearly missed.
