“I might be the world record holder for the person who has made the most documentaries about their family directing films,” he said. His career, he wrote in his book “Notes on a Life” (2008) reflects that “I am an observer at heart, with an impulse to record what I see around me.”
In the last part of life, Ms. tried. Coppola tried his hand at directing 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 wallow in gustatory privilege.” While “Love Is Love Is Love” by Ms. Coppola is better in 2021, said a Times reviewer, Teo Bugbee, who “doesn’t move the film.”
A source of enduring grief for Ms. Coppola the death of his son Gian-Carlo Coppola, the eldest of his three children, in 1986 at the age of 22. He was on a speedboat piloted by Griffin O’Neal, a son of the actor Ryan. O’Neal, who tried to maneuver between two slow-moving crafts that appeared to be connected by a tow line. Gio, as Coppola’s son called him, was pulled back by the tow line with such force that he died instantly. (Mr. O’Neal, convicted of negligence, was given a 30-day suspended sentence.)
The death of her son filled Ms. Coppola of “unspeakable rage,” he said. He channeled his grief in an art installation called “Circle of Memory,” which over the years has had several stages. It consists of a room with straw bale walls, with salt falling into a stream and children’s voices reciting the alphabet. Visitors are invited to remember children who have died or gone missing.
“I feel like there’s a circle of order going on in the universe and a circle of chaos,” he said. “And occasionally, they bump into each other.”
Eleanor Jessie Neil was born in Los Angeles on May 4, 1936, one of three children of Clifford and Delphine (Lougheed) Neil. Her father, a political cartoonist, died when Eleanor was 10 years old.
