The son of a classical musician, Coppola was born in Detroit. He took a graduate degree in film studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and while still at UCLA, worked for Roger Corman, making low-budget horror movies.In 1964, Coppola found employment as a scriptwriter and wrote a number of successful screenplays, culminating in Patton (1969), for which he received an Academy Award. He also directed several films, his first success being the musical, Finian's Rainbow (1968). In 1969, The Rain People was a critical success and indicated how Coppola could be as effective in a smaller, more personal type of film as in a more broad-brush feature.
In 1972, Coppola achieved worldwide fame with The Godfather, which he directed and co-wrote. This was massively successful both at the box office and with the critics, who acclaimed his transformation of Mario Puzo's pulp bestseller about the Mafia into a spectacular but deeply serious film about corruption in the USA. Some critics saw The Godfather not only as a classic thriller, but also as "a bold work of art that said more about America than almost any other film in history". The film won 3 Academy Awards (Oscars).
In sharp contrast was Coppola's next film, The Conversation (1974), a tautly-constructed film with paranoid overtones starring Gene Hackman. Many considered it to be his best work, but The Godfather, Part II, which appeared the same year, dwarfed it in terms of prizes, winning 7 Academy Awards.
In the late 1970s, Coppola began filming Apocalypse Now, an epic Vietnam war movie loosely based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The process was beset with all kinds of problems that drove the director to the point of psychological and financial collapse. Nevertheless, Coppola emerged with his reputation intact and more than recouped the $16 million of his own money that he had invested in the venture.
Coppola was less fortunate with his disastrous musical, One from the Heart (1982), which was only the first of a number of box-office and critical flops. In 1992, his company Zoetrope had to declare bankruptcy. With the exception of the amusingly nostalgic Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Coppola was not judged to have regained his touch until the 1990s, with the appearance of Godfather III (1990), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) and The Rainmaker (1997).
