Eleanor Coppola Dies: ‘Hearts Of Darkness’ Emmy Winner & Wife Of Francis Ford Coppola For 61 Years Was 87

Eleanor Coppola, who won an Emmy for the Apocalypse Now documentary Hearts of Darkness, directed Paris Can Wait and Love Is Love Is Love and was married to Francis Ford Coppola for 61 years, diedFriday at her home in Rutherford, CA. She was 87.

She also is the mother of Oscar-winning filmmaker Sofia Coppola and American Zoetrope president Roman Coppola. Sofia missed Thursday’s news conference for the New York Film Festival’s centerpiece premiere screening of her new film Priscilla to be with her ailing mother.

Eleanor Coppola won an Emmy and a DGA Award for helming Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, the 1991 documentary about the making of her husband’s seminal Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now. The production of that 1979 classic – which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar – was plagued by problems related to budget, casting, script, the weather – a typhoon destroyed much of the set – and even an active insurgency in the Philippines, the battle with which pulled away helicopters on loan from the government.

Eleanor filmed Francis’ daily routine and captured remarkable behind-the-scenes footage, and Hearts of Darkness has become perhaps the definitive document of a major motion picture production.

The entire Coppola family had moved to the Philippines — Francis, Eleanor and their three children, Gian-Carlo, Roman and Sofia — and Eleanor had been tasked with gathering documentary footage of the shoot that could be used by the United Artists marketing department. “I don’t know if [Francis] is just trying to keep me busy or if he wants to avoid the addition of a professional crew,” she wrote at the time. “Maybe both.”

The resulting film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse is both a cautionary tale and an existential salve for filmmakers — if one of the greatest movies of all time can survive such troubled seas on its way into cinemas, perhaps that struggle is a necessary part of the creative process.

“The beginning of the film idea for me was certainly documenting Apocalypse Now,” Eleanor Coppola told Deadline in a 2017 interview. “I had no idea. I’d made some little art films in the early ’70s, but when