When Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a camcorder from the set and raced over to capture the moment. “When they say, ‘It’s a girl,’ my dad gasps and nearly drops the camera,” Sofia Coppola told me recently, of her birth video. “My mom is there, just trying to focus.” The footage—which has been screened by the family multiple times over the years, and as part of a feminist art installation designed by Eleanor—was the first of many instances in which Sofia would be seen through her father’s lens. When she was just a few months old, Francis cast her in her first official film role, as the infant in the dénouement of “The Godfather,” in which Michael Corleone, the ascendant boss of the Corleone crime family, anoints the head of his newborn nephew as his associates murder rival gangsters one by one.
This story is from the January 29, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the January 29, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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ART OF STONE
\"The Brutalist.\"
MOMMA MIA
Audra McDonald triumphs in \"Gypsy\" on Broadway.
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
\"Black Doves,\" on Netflix.
NATURE STUDIES
Kyle Abraham's “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful.”
WHAT GOOD IS MORALITY?
Ask not just where it came from but what it does for us
THE SPOTIFY SYNDROME
What is the world's largest music-streaming platform really costing us?
THE LEPER - LEE CHANGDONG
. . . to survive, to hang on, waiting for the new world to dawn, what can you do but become a leper nobody in the world would deign to touch? - From \"Windy Evening,\" by Kim Seong-dong.
YOU WON'T GET FREE OF IT
Alice Munro's partner sexually abused her daughter. The harm ran through the work and the family.
TALK SENSE
How much sway does our language have over our thinking?
TO THE DETECTIVE INVESTIGATING MY MURDER
Dear Detective, I'm not dead, but a lot of people can't stand me. What I mean is that breathing is not an activity they want me to keep doing. What I mean is, they want to knock me off. My days are numbered.