“I may hold the world record for the person who has made the most documentaries about his family by directing films,” he said. Her career, she wrote in “Notes on a Life,” a 2008 book, reflected that “I am an observer at heart, who has the impulse to record what I see around me.”
Later in his life, Coppola attempted to direct cinematic fiction, with decidedly mixed results. His “Paris Can Wait,” released in 2017 when he was 81, was dismissed by Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times as “little more than an indulgent revel in gustatory privilege.” While Coppola's “Love Is Love Is Love” fared better in 2021, a Times critic, Teo Bugbee, nonetheless said that “the film doesn't move.”
A source of lasting pain for Coppola was the death of his son Gian-Carlo Coppola in 1986, at age 22, the eldest of his three children. He was in a speedboat run by Griffin O'Neal, son of actor Ryan O'Neal, who attempted to maneuver between two slow-moving boats that turned out to be connected by a tow line. Gio, as Coppola's son was called, was knocked down by the tow cable with such force that he died instantly. (Mr. O'Neal, found guilty of negligence, received a 30-day suspended sentence.)
The son's death filled Coppola with “indescribable anger,” he said. He channeled his pain into an art installation called “Circle of Memory,” which has had several stagings over the years. It consists of a chamber whose walls are bales of straw, with salt falling into a stream and children's voices reciting the alphabet. Visitors are invited to remember the children who died or went missing.
“I feel like there's a circle of order in the universe and a circle of chaos,” he said. “And from time to time, they cross paths.”
Eleanor Jessie Neil was born in Los Angeles on May 4, 1936, one of three children of Clifford and Delphine (Lougheed) Neil. Her father was a political cartoonist who died when Eleanor was 10 years old.
