Sofia Carmina Coppola is an American filmmaker and actress, born on May 14, 1971. She is the youngest child and only daughter of filmmakers Eleanor and Francis Ford Coppola. Sofia made her debut in the film industry as an infant in her father’s acclaimed crime drama film, The Godfather, in 1972. Later, she appeared in several music videos and played a supporting role in Peggy Sue Got Married in 1986. In 1990, Sofia portrayed Mary Corleone, the daughter of Michael Corleone, in The Godfather Part III, but her performance received criticism, which led her to shift her focus to filmmaking.
Sofia made her feature-length directorial debut with the coming-of-age drama The Virgin Suicides in 1999, which was the first of her collaborations with actress Kirsten Dunst. In 2004, she received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the comedy-drama Lost in Translation, and became the third woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director. In 2006, Sofia directed the historical drama Marie Antoinette, starring Dunst as the title character. In 2010, she won the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, with the drama Somewhere, becoming the first American woman (and fourth American filmmaker) to do so. In 2013, she directed the satirical crime film The Bling Ring, based on the Vanity Fair article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins” by Nancy Jo Sales about the real group of burglarizing teens who were “motivated by vanity and worship. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
In 2015, Sofia released her Christmas special, A Very Murray Christmas, starring Bill Murray on Netflix. At the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, she won Best Director for her work on the drama film The Beguiled, becoming the second woman in the festival’s history to win the award. Her latest film, On the Rocks (2020), received a limited theatrical release in October 2020 by A24, as well as a streaming release on AppleTV+. The film received positive reviews, although critics also stated that it is unlikely to achieve the same kind of iconic status as some of Coppola’s previous work.
