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| F. F. Coppola and his characters |
Francis Ford Coppola was born in 1939 in the USA, in an Italian-American family. His father was a composer and musician, his mother an actress.
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| Nicolas Cage, Sofia Coppola and F. F. Coppola, |
Af
ter graduating in drama he worked at UCLA in filmmaking. His first film as a director was Dementia 13 (1963). Coppola collaborated in various scripts (sceneggiature) like the adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s This Property is Condemned, Is Paris Burning? (1966) and Patton (1970), which won a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award (Oscar). In 1969, in San Francisco, Coppola and George Lucas founded American Zoetrope, an independent film production company. Their first projects were THX 1138 (1971), and American Graffiti (1973), both produced by Coppola and directed by Lucas. Coppola first Oscaras Best Director was Padrino(1972) with the screenplay by Mario Puzo. He wrote the screen play for The Great Gatsby (1974) and directed The Conversation (1974). In the same year Il Padrino – II (1974), was released (apparve al cinema) and won six Academy Awards. In 1979 Coppola began working on his most ambitious film, Apocalypse Now (1979), a film about the Vietnam War inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Cuore di tenebra (1993). In the same year Coppola produced Black Stallion (1979); in 1980 , together with Lucas, produced Kagemusha (1980), directed by Akira Kurosawa, and Mishima: a life in four chapters (1985), directed by Paul Schrader, based on the life and writings of Yukio Mishima – a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, and film director. Other productions include Hammett (1982), The Black Stallion Returns (1983), The Cotton Club (1984), Barfly(1987), Tucker: The Man and His Dream(1988), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)…His nephew is the famous actor Nicolas Cage and his daughter Sofia is a remarkable director who has got fame with the film Marie Antoinette (2006).