Sofia Coppola was mocked as an actress, then won an Oscar for writing
In 1990 Sofia Coppola collected two Golden Raspberry awards for playing Mary Corleone in The Godfather Part III, a part she took only when Winona Ryder dropped out. Thirteen years later she won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Lost in Translation, making her a third-generation Oscar winner.
Born in New York City on May 14, 1971, she was the youngest child and only daughter of documentarian Eleanor Coppola and director Francis Ford Coppola, and she grew up on the family farm in Rutherford, California. Her screen career started before she could walk: she is the baby being baptised in The Godfather (1972), and she turned up in the background of eight of her father's films. At 15 she interned at Chanel, and she later studied painting at CalArts before launching a clothing label, Milkfed, now sold only in Japan.
The Godfather Part III changed everything. Critics tore into her performance, some argued it hurt the film at the box office, and she worried the role had come only because she was the director's daughter. She has said she never wanted to act and simply helped when asked, so the reviews did not wound her. She largely quit performing, apart from cameos such as a handmaiden to Queen Amidala in The Phantom Menace (1999).
A short film, Lick the Star (1998), convinced her that directing combined everything she loved. Her first feature adapted Jeffrey Eugenides's novel The Virgin Suicides, which the musician Thurston Moore had recommended to her in 1995; she wrote the script herself and has linked its theme of loss to the 1986 boating death of her eldest brother. Lost in Translation followed in 2003, shot in 27 days without permits, with hotel corridors at the Park Hyatt borrowed between two and three in the morning. She became only the third woman nominated for Best Director, after Lina Wertmüller and Jane Campion.
That film also drew accusations of anti-Japanese stereotyping from Asian Mediawatch and others; in 2024 she conceded to The New Yorker that parts of it had not aged well. Marie Antoinette (2006), filmed at Versailles with Kirsten Dunst and pop songs from the 1970s and 80s, was booed and cheered at Cannes and later won the Oscar for costume design. Her more recent work includes The Beguiled (2017) and Priscilla (2023).
Source: Sofia Coppola
