Eleanor
Coppola, who has died aged 87, was an artist, writer and director whose eye for
the chaos and carnival of cinema shone through one of the foremost films about
filmmaking: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), an Emmy-winning
documentary fashioned by directors Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper from the
reels of footage Coppola shot behind the scenes of her husband Francis Ford
Coppola’s legendary Apocalypse Now (1979). Filming
partly to gather marketing material for United Artists, and partly to alleviate
boredom instilled by a notoriously attenuated shoot in the Philippines, Eleanor
caught scenes as dramatic as Apocalypse Now itself: a budget spiralling
out of control, monsoon-strafed sets, and serious breakdowns in communication
between the actors and their self-doubting director. “I tell you from the
bottom of my heart that I am making a bad film,” Francis was heard lamenting. “We
are all lost.”
Such
scenes articulated a heightened if fraught marital intimacy. Roger Ebert noted
how Hearts of Darkness “strips [Francis] Coppola bare of all defences
and yet reveals him as a great and brave filmmaker.” (Coppola himself half-jokingly
retitled the documentary “Watch Francis Suffer”.) In his gossipy New Hollywood
history Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind suggested the shoot
brought pre-existing tensions between Eleanor and the straying Francis to a
cyclonic head.
The
pair had met on the set of Francis’s first film, the Roger Corman-backed,
Irish-shot Dementia 13 (1963), where Eleanor, two years older, was the
assistant art director. Eleanor became pregnant soon afterwards; the couple wed
the same year in Vegas and remained married until her death.
After
furnishing Francis’s American Zoetrope studio in orange and royal blue when it
opened in 1969, Eleanor reportedly inspired the characterisation of Kay
Corleone in The Godfather (1972). Despite the turbulence of the 1970s – during
which Francis took to introducing Eleanor as “my first wife” – she raised all
three of the couple’s children while also proving instrumental to the success
of the Coppola wineries.
In
her thoughtful 2008 memoir Notes on a Life, Eleanor reflected on the compromises
entailed by marriage and motherhood: “Over the years I stopped whatever I was
doing to go on location with Francis and the children. I sincerely tried to be
a good wife and mother... For a variety of reasons, I haven’t created a body of
notable work in my life when many around me have, and I haven’t yet made peace
with that truth.”
Eleanor
Jessie Neil was born on May 4, 1936 in Long Beach, California, one of three
children to political cartoonist Clifford Neil and his wife Delphine (née
Lougheed). She studied applied design at UCLA before pausing her career as a
tapestry maker.
Yet
in later life, after her children Roman and Sofia had established their
filmmaking credentials, Coppola found a creative second wind, directing two
semi-autobiographical features: Paris Can Wait (2016), in which Diane
Lane takes a scenic French break from bigshot husband Alec Baldwin, and the
portmanteau Love is Love is Love (2020) in which, asked the secret to her
long marriage, a philandering producer’s wife (Joanne Whalley) replies “Don’t
get divorced”.
While
promoting the former, Coppola told one interviewer: “I grew up in the Forties
and Fifties, [when] a woman’s role was to support her husband and make a nice
home for him. I was frustrated that I didn’t have much time to pursue my
interests. Young women today have no concept of that. My daughter and her
generation […] take for granted that they’re going to do whatever is their
calling. There’s not going to be a question of their role or if they have to
give it up because they’re a wife and a mother.”
She
is survived by her husband, and two of her three children, Sofia and Roman. Her
eldest son Gian-Carlo died in a boating accident aged 22 in 1986.
Eleanor
Coppola, born May 4, 1936, died April 12, 2024.
