Eleanor Coppola – best known as director of documentary Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, and legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola’s wife and collaborator – has passed away at 87.
Eleanor family released a statement to the Associated Press on Friday confirming her death. No cause of death was given.
She first met Francis in 1962 while working as an assistant art director on his feature directorial debut, the low-budget horror movie Dementia 13.
They struck up a romance, kicking off a personal and professional relationship that lasted more than six decades until her death.
Over the course of her career she directed several documentaries, often behind-the-scenes looks at the movies of her husband and their daughter Sofia Coppola.
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Eleanor Coppola – best known as legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola ‘s wife and collaborator – has passed away at 87
Francis and Eleanor, who were together since meeting on the set of his directorial debut in 1962, are pictured together in 1991
Eleanor was born in Los Angeles and largely raised by a single mother after the death of her father when she herself was only 10 years old.
After majoring in applied design at UCLA, she began a career as an assistant art director on movies – which brought her to the Ireland set of Dementia 13.
Francis and Eleanor began dating during the making of the movie and in 1963, she discovered that she was pregnant with his baby.
He talked her out of giving the baby up for adoption, and the pair tied the knot in a Las Vegas shotgun wedding in 1963 before welcoming their son Gian-Carlo.
Although she largely spent the next couple of decades raising the couple’s children Gian-Carlo, Roman and Sofia, she remained in the film world via her husband.
She accompanied him to the sets of his movies as his star rose in the early 1970s with such films as The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and The Conversation.
In the mid-1970s, Eleanor was a firsthand witness to the chaotic making of her husband’s Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now.
The production in the Philippines was beset by one crisis after another, from a typhoon that destroyed the sets to the star Martin Sheen suffering a heart attack.
Eleanor directed several documentaries, often behind-the-scenes looks at the movies of her husband and their daughter Sofia Coppola; pictured with Sofia in 2017
Eleanor revealed that at one point, the movie was running more than $2 million over budget, an alarming amount in the mid-1970s.
The production was rocked by tragedy when two of the people hired to build a gargantuan temple set were killed in an accident during construction.
Putting her creative mind to work, Eleanor began filming the tumultuous production for what ultimately became Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.
She is one of multiple credited directors for the behind-the-scenes documentary, which was released in 1991 and became a classic of the genre, to the point it was even parodied in the smash hit comedy Tropic Thunder.
‘I never intended to make the documentary of all documentaries,’ she told CNN years later. ‘I was just trying to keep myself occupied with something to do because we were out there for so long. I just had never shot a documentary before.’
She recalled: ‘They wanted five minutes for a TV promotional or something and I thought sooner of later I could get five minutes of film and then it went on to 15 minutes. I just kept shooting but I had no idea…the evolution of myself that I saw with my camera. So, it was a surprise for both of us and a life changing experience.’
Eleanor also got a close look at the way her husband’s frame of mind suffered as the tortuous shoot of Apocalypse Now dragged on.
‘It was a journey for him up the river I always felt. He went deeper and deeper into himself and deeper and deeper and deeper into the production. It just got out of control. He didn’t have the ending. He didn’t know how to deal with it,’ she said.
‘The script was evolving and the scenes were changing – it just got larger and more complex. And little by little he got out there as far as his characters. That wasn’t the intention at all at the beginning.’
After the splash made by Hearts Of Darkness, she continued in her career as a documentarian, filming the making of her husband’s 1997 movie The Rainmaker.
She also made behind-the-scenes movies about her daughter’s films The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette and her son Roman’s movie CQ.
Eleanor explored her other interests in documentaries as well, such as the 1996 short A Visit To China’s Miao Country.
In 2016, around her 80th birthday, she broke into narrative feature films by directing the comedy Paris Can Wait, starring Diane Lane and Alec Baldwin.
