“I may hold the world’s record for the person who has made the most documentaries about their family directing films,” she said. Her career, she wrote in her book “Notes on a Life” (2008) reflected that “I am an observer at heart, who has the impulse to record what I see around me.”
Late in life, Ms. Coppola tried her hand at directing cinematic fiction, with decidedly mixed results. Her “Paris Can Wait,” released in 2017 when she was 81, was dismissed by Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times as “little more than an indulgent wallow in gustatory privilege.” While Ms. Coppola’s “Love Is Love Is Love” fared better in 2021, a Times reviewer, Teo Bugbee, nonetheless said that “the movie doesn’t move.”
A source of enduring heartache for Ms. Coppola was the death of her son Gian-Carlo Coppola, the oldest of her three children, in 1986 at 22. He was in a speedboat steered by Griffin O’Neal, a son of the actor Ryan O’Neal, who tried to maneuver between two slow-moving crafts that turned out to be connected by a tow line. Gio, as the Coppola son was called, was knocked back by the tow line with such force that he died instantly. (Mr. O’Neal, convicted of negligence, was given a 30-day suspended sentence.)
Her son’s death filled Ms. Coppola with “unspeakable rage,” she said. She channeled her grief into an art installation called “Circle of Memory,” which over the years has had several stagings. It consists of a chamber whose walls are straw bales, with salt falling in a stream and children’s voices reciting the alphabet. Visitors are invited to recall children who had died or disappeared.
“I feel like there’s a circle of order going on in the universe and a circle of chaos,” she said. “And every once in a while, they intersect.”
Eleanor Jessie Neil was born in Los Angeles on May 4, 1936, one of three children of Clifford and Delphine (Lougheed) Neil. Her father, a political cartoonist, died when Eleanor was 10.
