Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola (1939), US film director, writer, and producer. Born to Italian parents in Detroit, Coppola began his film career working on low-budget horror movies. He achieved his first real success with the screenplay for Patton (1970), which won an Oscar. Further acclaim followed with The Godfather (1972), a gangster epic that Coppola directed and co-wrote, and The Godfather, Part II (1974). His later films include Apocalypse Now (1979), a complex film about the Vietnam War, The Cotton Club (1984), one of Hollywood’s most notorious flops, The Godfather, Part III (1990), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992).