The trailer for the highly-anticipated Priscilla has dropped - and as the hype grows around the movie, fans are desperate to know more about who director Sofia Coppola is.
The movie - which is set to be released in the UK early January - features Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla Presley, and Jacob Elordi as Elvis Presley. Sofia has both directed and wrote Priscilla, after being inspired by reading the Priscilla's own memoir. The movie will delve into Priscilla Presley's life, following her journey from teen to wife of a rock and roll legend.
So, as the world goes wild over the director's latest film, allow us to indulge you in the ultimate Coppola family guide.
Who is Sofia Coppola?
Sofia Coppola is a globally renowned actor and director best known for appearing in her parents acclaimed crime drama The Godfather as an infant, later going on to pursue her own film-making career directing award-winning screenplays such as Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette and The Beguiled. She also directed psychological thriller The Virgin Suicides, coming of age film Somewhere and crime drama The Bling Ring.
In 2004, Coppola became the third woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director, and in 2010 became the first American woman to win the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival (the awarding bodies top prize), seven years later becoming only the second woman to receive Best Director at Cannes Film Festival.
Why is the Coppola family so famous?
Sofia comes from a long line of esteemed artists. Her father Francis Ford Coppola is considered one of the major figures of the New Hollywood filmmaking movement of the 1960s and 1970s, receiving five Academy Awards, six Golden Globe Award and two Palmes d'Or. Her mother, Elena Coppola is a documentary filmmaker, known for her 1991 film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. She is known for creating behind-the-scenes looks at her family’s greatest work, capturing the struggle her family films go through before they make it to the big screen.
Sofia Coppola’s grandparents are Carmie and Italia Coppola, her grandfather an American composer who contributed original music to The Godfather series, winning both an Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Original Score. Italia, Sofia’s grandmother, also appeared in The Godfather series in non-speaking roles, but she's best known for her cooking, releasing cookbook Mama Coppola's Pasta Book which led to the release of her own line of pasta sauces, Mammarella.
Sofia Coppola’s siblings, Gian-Carlo Coppola, and Roman Coppola, are also in the film-making industry, as is her auntie Talia Shire (who played Connie Corleone in The Godfather) and niece Gia Coppola. In the weirdest link of all, Sofia Coppola’s cousin is actor Nicolas Cage!
If that isn’t the most intense Hollywood family tree of all time, we’re not sure what is. But it’s the famous family ties that have given Sofia such an aversion to nepo-baby critiques, with Sofia plagued by criticism her entire career for coming from such an esteemed family of filmmakers.
Who is Sofia Coppola’s husband?
Sofia has been married twice; her first husband was director Spike Jonze whom she’s largely thought to have based the main character’s husband on in Lost in Translation. The pair were married only four years, releasing a statement in 2003 that they had decided to divorce ‘with sadness’.
For two years, Sofia dated filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, ending their relationship in 2005 but going on to remain friends since the separation.
Then, in 2011, Coppola married her current husband, musician Thomas Mars, whom she met while producing the soundtrack to The Virgin Suicides in 1999. Their first daughter Romy Croquet Mars was born in 2006, her name an homage to brother Roman, while their second daughter Cosima Croquet Mars was born in 2010.
Coppola has largely kept her children out of the spotlight, hoping to have her daughters lives unaffected by her career and travel. ‘I don’t want them ever to be jaded,’ she told The Guardian in 2017. ‘I never saw the point of taking little kids to movie premieres and stuff. I just want them to have a childhood.’
Who is Romy Croquet Mars, Sofia Coppola’s daughter?
Imagine a female character from a Sofia Coppola-directed movie, any Sofia Coppola-directed movie… got one? Now go watch the director’s daughter, Romy Mars, on TikTok and tell us that’s not the exact person you’re picturing. Romy, aged 16, is the human embodiment of her legacy of work in more ways than one.
The teen offspring of one of America’s most esteemed Hollywood families recently went viral after posting a TikTok revealing that she was grounded after attempting to ‘charter a helicopter from New York to Maryland’ on her dad’s credit card to go meet a friend she’d made at camp. Ob-freaking-sessed.
Who is this hilarious nepo-baby we’ve not heard of and why is she so iconic? The daughter of Sofia and musician Thomas Mars has been kept out of the public eye her entire life, telling followers that her parents ‘biggest rule’ is that she can’t have public social media accounts because ‘they don’t want me to be a nepotism kid’. Romy, now aged 16, has thus never been spotted on social media before.
The only clue viewers got into what her life is like, aside from her parents’ strict rules about public social media accounts, is that she doesn’t know the different between a garlic and an onion (it’s okay Romy, Kendall can’t even cut a cucumber). She did make one comment viewers found sad, telling followers ‘This is my babysitters boyfriend Ari, because my parents are never home so these are my replacement parents.’
Of course, Romy is a 16-year-old grounded at home for trying to charter a helicopter, so we can give her parents some liberties in the hopes that she’s just being a classically dramatic teen with that comment, right?
Does Sofia Coppola have other children?
Sofia’s other daughter, Cosima, has not surfaced online and is yet to be seen publicly at events – but she is 13 years old, so we’ll give her time.
Ultimately, the Coppola family tree is now one everyone wants to know more about – perhaps we’ll get a behind the scenes look from Elena into helicopter-gate any day now?