Eleanor Coppola – best known as the director of the documentary Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, and the wife and collaborator of legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola – has died at the age of 87.
The 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 when she worked as assistant art director on his feature debut, the low-budget horror film Dementia 13.
They struck up a romance and began a personal and professional relationship that lasted more than sixty years until her death.
Over the course of her career, she has directed several documentaries, often behind-the-scenes looks at the films of her husband and their daughter Sofia Coppola.
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Eleanor Coppola – best known as the wife and collaborator of legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola – has died at the age of 87
Eleanor was born in Los Angeles and raised largely by a single mother after the death of her father when she was only 10 years old.
After majoring in applied design at UCLA, she began a career as an assistant art director for films, which took her to the Irish set of Dementia 13.
Francis and Eleanor started dating during the making of the film and in 1963 she discovered she was pregnant with his baby.
He persuaded her not to put the baby up for adoption, and the couple married in a shotgun wedding in Las Vegas in 1963 before welcoming their son Gian-Carlo.
Although she spent the next few decades largely raising the couple’s children Gian-Carlo, Roman and Sofia, she remained in the film business through her husband.
She accompanied him to the sets of his films when his star rose in the early 1970s with films such as The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and The Conversation.
In the mid-1970s, Eleanor witnessed firsthand the chaotic making of her husband’s Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now.
Production in the Philippines was plagued by one crisis after another, from a typhoon destroying sets to star Martin Sheen suffering a heart attack.
Eleanor revealed that at one point the film was more than $2 million over budget and six weeks behind schedule, a staggering amount in the mid-1970s.
Putting her creative mind to work, Eleanor began filming the tumultuous production for what would eventually become Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.
She is one of several credited directors of the behind-the-scenes documentary, which was released in 1991 and became a classic of the genre, to the point that it was even parodied in the hit comedy Tropic Thunder.
