Sofia Coppola (born May 14, 1971, New York, New York, U.S.) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and fashion designer known best for her films The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Lost in Translation (2003). In 2004, she was the first American woman to be nominated for an Academy Award in the category of best director.
Coppola is the daughter of film director Francis Ford Coppola and artist and documentary filmmaker Eleanor Coppola. Sofia was born in New York City while her father was filming The Godfather. She grew up in northern California and played small parts in her father’s films, often under the stage name “Domino Coppola.” Her first (and last) significant role was as Michael Corleone’s daughter Mary in the third Godfather movie. The overwhelmingly negative reaction from critics and audiences to her performance pushed her away from a career in acting. Instead, in the early 1990s she briefly studied painting at California Institute of the Arts and dabbled in modeling, photography, and fashion design. In 1994 she co-launched a fashion line in Japan called Milk Fed. It was in the late 1990s that she created her first films, two shorts: Bed, Bath, and Beyond (1996) and Lick the Star (1998). In 1999 her first feature film, The Virgin Suicides, was released. Coppola herself wrote the screenplay based on the novel of the same name by Jeffrey Eugenides. That same year she married director-producer Spike Jonze (divorced 2003).
Coppola’s next feature, Lost in Translation (2003)—which she wrote, directed, and produced—earned her an Academy Award for best original screenplay, a nomination for best picture, and a historic nomination for best director, the first American woman to receive that recognition. That film, starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, was a runaway commercial and critical hit. Lost in Translation was followed by the less-appreciated Marie Antoinette (2006), adapted from Antonia Fraser’s revisionist and compassionate biography, Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001). Set in lavish interiors and with elaborate costuming and a strikingly anachronistic 1980s soundtrack, Coppola’s film portrayed the young 18th-century queen-to-be (played by Kirsten Dunst) from a fresh, personal—rather than the standard historical—perspective. Though it was considered a stunning cinematic display (it won the Academy Award for best costumes), the movie was largely panned by critics for lacking depth. Coppola returned to the fashion world in 2008 to design a line of leather handbags for the Louis Vuitton fashion house.
In 2010 she released the film Somewhere, which won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion prize for best film, and in 2013 she released The Bling Ring. In May 2016 she staged her first opera, Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata, in collaboration with fashion designer Valentino at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome. In 2017 Coppola became the second woman to win the best director award at the Cannes film festival. She was honored for her work in The Beguiled, a Civil War thriller about a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the women at a Southern boarding school. In addition to helming the film, she wrote the script, which was adapted from a novel by Thomas Cullinan. Coppola then reteamed with Murray—this time, on the dramedy On the Rocks, about a young mother who, fearing that her husband is having an affair, seeks the help of her playboy father.
Coppola wrote, directed, and produced 2023’s Priscilla, a biopic about actress and businesswoman Priscilla Presley. Based on Presley’s 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, the film follows a teenage Priscilla Beaulieu’s courtship with and subsequent marriage to rock-and-roll icon Elvis Presley. Priscilla premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2023, and the audience gave it a seven-minute standing ovation.