Francis Ford Coppola, American director, producer, and screenwriter
Francis Ford Coppola (; Italian: [ˈkɔppola]; born April 7, 1939) is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He was a central figure in the New Hollywood filmmaking movement of the 1960s and 1970s. His accolades include five Academy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, two Palmes d'Or, and a British Academy Film Award.
After directing The Rain People in 1969, Coppola co-wrote Patton (1970), earning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay along with Edmund H. North. Coppola's reputation as a filmmaker was cemented with the release of The Godfather (1972), which revolutionized movie-making in the gangster genre and had a strong commercial and critical reception. The Godfather won three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay (shared with Mario Puzo).
The Godfather Part II, which followed in 1974, became the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Highly regarded by critics, the film brought Coppola three more Academy Awards—Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture—making him the second director (after Billy Wilder) to be so honored three times for the same film. The Conversation, which Coppola directed, produced and wrote, was released that same year, winning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. His next film, Apocalypse Now (1979), which notoriously had a lengthy and strenuous production, was widely acclaimed for vividly depicting the Vietnam War. The film won the Palme d'Or, making Coppola one of only eight filmmakers to have won that award twice.
His best-known films released since the start of the 1980s are the 1983 dramas The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, the crime dramas The Cotton Club (1984) and The Godfather Part III (1990), and the 1992 romantic-horror film Bram Stoker's Dracula, based on the novel of the same name. A number of Coppola's relatives and children have become famous actors and filmmakers in their own right: his sister Talia Shire is an actress, his daughter Sofia and granddaughter Gia are directors, his son Roman is a screenwriter, and his nephews Jason Schwartzman and Nicolas Cage are actors. Coppola resides in Napa, California, and since the 2010s has been a vintner, owning a family-brand as well as a winery of his own.