(May 4, 1936 – April 12, 2024)
Eleanor Coppola, who won an Emmy for the Apocalypse Now documentary Hearts of Darkness, directed Paris Can Wait and Love Is Love Is Love and was married to Francis Ford Coppola for 61 years, died Friday at her home in Rutherford, CA. She was 87.
She also is the mother of Oscar-winning filmmaker Sofia Coppola and American Zoetrope president Roman Coppola.
Eleanor Coppola won an Emmy and a DGA Award for helming Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, the 1991 documentary about the making of her husband’s seminal Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now. The production of that 1979 classic – which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar – was plagued by problems related to budget, casting, script, the weather – a typhoon destroyed much of the set – and even an active insurgency in the Philippines, the battle with which pulled away helicopters on loan from the government.
Eleanor filmed Francis’ daily routine and captured remarkable behind-the-scenes footage, and Hearts of Darkness has become perhaps the definitive document of a major motion picture production. The resulting film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse is both a cautionary tale and an existential salve for filmmakers — if one of the greatest movies of all time can survive such troubled seas on its way into cinemas, perhaps that struggle is a necessary part of the creative process.
As a writer, she published two acclaimed books, Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now (1979) and Notes on a Life (2008). At the age of 87, she completed her third book chronicling her recent life. In the manuscript Eleanor 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.”
She is survived by Francis; Roman and his wife, Jen, their children, Pascale, Marcello and Alessandro; Sofia and her husband, Thomas, their children Romy and Cosima; her granddaughter Gia and her husband, Honor, and their child Beaumont; and by her brother William Neil and his wife, Lisa.
