Director Eleanor Coppola attends a particular screening of Paris Can Wait in New York in 2014.

Brent N. Clarke/Invision/AP

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Director Eleanor Coppola attends a particular screening of Paris Can Wait in New York in 2014.

Brent N. Clarke/Invision/AP

Eleanor Coppola died on Friday at her dwelling in Northern California’s Napa Valley, in response to a press release from her household shared with NPR by way of her press agent. She was 87 years previous. The reason behind her loss of life has not but been shared publicly.

The documentarian was finest identified for chronicling the moviemaking technique of members of the family Francis Ford Coppola, to whom she was married for greater than 60 years and her daughter Sofia Coppola.

Eleanor Coppola was the mom of three children when Francis Ford Coppola requested her to return to the Philippines to document the making of his 1979 magnum opus on the Vietnam War, Apocalypse Now, starring Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen.

“They got very casual about their weapons,” mentioned Eleanor Coppola in a 1992 interview with WHYY’s Fresh Air of the bodyguards the Philippine authorities employed to guard the Coppola household throughout their time there, fearing insurgents would try and kidnap the well-known Hollywood director. “Our main bodyguard would stick his pistol in his belt of his blue jeans and he’d get it out and show the kids how it worked.”

The filmmaking course of, which Eleanor Coppola captured on digital camera in candid element, was famously fraught. Heavy rains delayed capturing and a storm destroyed units. Sheen had a coronary heart assault. Brando was chubby and could not play the position as Francis Ford Coppola had initially conceived it; your complete half needed to be rewritten. The manufacturing ran over schedule and vastly exceeded its funds, threatening to bankrupt its director.

“Everyone says, yes, well, Francis works best in a crisis,” Francis Ford Coppola instructed his spouse throughout certainly one of their many heart-to-hearts captured by her on digital camera at the moment. “I’m saying this is one crisis I’m not gonna pull myself out of. I’m making a bad movie, so why should I go ahead?”

Released three years later, Apocalypse Now was declared a masterpiece — as was, in its personal quieter means, Eleanor Coppola’s 1991 documentary in regards to the tortured making of that movie, Hearts of Darkness.

“It strips Coppola bare of all defenses and yet reveals him as a great and brave filmmaker,” wrote movie critic Roger Ebert of the documentary in 1992. “It also reveals the ordeal he put his actors and crew through, on location in the Philippines – and what he endured at their hands.”

Eleanor Coppola grew up in Southern California and attended the University of California, Los Angeles, the place she majored in utilized design. She began out as a visible artist. In 1962, she met her future husband whereas working within the artwork division on Francis Ford Coppola’s low-budget characteristic movie debut, Dementia 13. They had been married the next yr.

Apocalypse Now practically broke the Coppolas’ marriage. In the Fresh Air interview, Eleanor Coppola spoke about sending her husband a telex — which she additionally shared with different manufacturing workers — telling him he was changing into like Kurtz (the madly intense character on the coronary heart of the movie) and creating his personal Vietnam, via his extreme habits. The couple went via many ups and downs over time, together with extra-marital affairs, totally on Francis Ford Coppola’s facet.

But they stayed collectively. “The constant in a constantly upheaving carnival of film art and film crazy was Eleanor,” mentioned Kim Aubry, the previous vice chairman for know-how and submit manufacturing at Francis Ford Coppola’s manufacturing firm, American Zoetrope. “She always provided a shelter in the storm for all of us.”

Eleanor Coppola went on to make documentaries about The Rainmaker, directed by her partner, and her daughter Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette. Late in life, she additionally wrote and directed her personal characteristic movies — Paris Can Wait and Love is Love is Love.

Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola and Eleanor Coppola are pictured in 2013.

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Todd Williamson/Invision/AP

Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola and Eleanor Coppola are pictured in 2013.

Todd Williamson/Invision/AP

Eleanor Coppola was additionally an completed visible artist. Her drawings, photographs and conceptual artwork items had been exhibited in galleries and museums around the globe. She designed costumes for up to date dance productions and created experimental artwork installations.

“Eleanor was an extraordinary and gifted person who encouraged everyone with whom she came in contact,” mentioned filmmaker and visible artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, an in depth pal and inventive collaborator of Coppola, in an e mail to NPR. “Her generosity and spirit profoundly resonated and enhanced those fortunate enough to know her. The gift of her art, in many disciplines, remain as her great legacy.”

She was additionally carefully concerned with the household’s intensive wine enterprise in Northern California. Wine-making ran in Francis Ford Coppola’s household. In the mid-Nineteen Seventies, following his success with the Godfather films, the movie director bought a Napa Valley property and began making wine.

Eleanor Coppola was a author as properly. She was 87 when she accomplished her third memoir. According to her household’s assertion, within the manuscript, the creator 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.”