Sofia Coppola Biography

Sofia Coppola is the writer and director of the critically acclaimed movies The Virgin Suicides (1999, starring Kirsten Dunst) and Lost in Translation (2003, starring Bill Murray).

The daughter of legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, Sofia Coppola got her start in the movies as an infant in The Godfather (1972).

In her younger years she appeared as an actor in a number of her dad’s movies, including The Outsiders and Rumble Fish (both 1983), The Cotton Club (1984, with Richard Gere) and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986, co-starring her cousin, Nicolas Cage).

Her first movie as a writer/director, the somber The Virgin Suicides, proved that she was an able and mature filmmaker, and the sophistication of Lost in Translation (which earned her an Oscar for best original screenplay) made it clear she was an up-and-coming force in the movies. Lost in Translation also made a star of Scarlett Johansson, who played a young American who shares a sleep-deprived week in Tokyo with a dissatisfied movie star played by Bill Murray.

Sofia Coppola’s next film, Marie Antoinette, debuted at Cannes in 2006 and starred Kirsten Dunst as the French queen. Somewhere, a Hollywood story directed by Coppola and starring Stephen Dorff as a ennui-ridden movie star and Elle Fanning as his daughter, was released in 2010.

Her 2013 film The Bling Ring starred Katie Chang and Emma Watson as ennui-ridden LA teens who break into celebrity homes for the thrill of it, and her 2017 film, The Beguiled, was a re-make of the 1971 Clint Eastwood film.