Francis Ford Coppola - Early Life

Early Life

Coppola was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family of Italian ancestry (his paternal grandparents were immigrants from Bernalda, Basilicata). He received his middle name in honor of Henry Ford, having been born at the Henry Ford Hospital. His parents were Italia (née Pennino) and Carmine Coppola, who was the principal flautist for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. He was the second of three children (his older brother was August Coppola and younger sister is actress Talia Shire). Two years later, Carmine became the principal flautist for the NBC Symphony Orchestra and the family moved to New York City, finding a home in Woodside, Queens, where Francis spent the remainder of his childhood.

Coppola had polio as a boy, leaving him bedridden for large periods of his childhood and allowing him to indulge his imagination with homemade puppet theater productions. Reading A Streetcar Named Desire at age 15 was instrumental in developing his interest in theater. Eager to be involved in film-craft, he turned out 8mm features edited from home movies with such titles as The Rich Millionaire and The Lost Wallet. As a child he was a mediocre student, but was very much interested in technology and engineering; so much, in fact, that his friends nicknamed him “Science”. Initially he trained for a career in music and became so proficient on the tuba that he won a musical scholarship to the New York Military Academy. After graduating from the Great Neck North High School, he entered Hofstra University in 1955 majoring in theater arts. There he won a play-writing scholarship, which furthered his interest in directing theater, though this wasn't approved by his father, who wanted him to study engineering. However, after he chanced to see Sergei Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days That Shook the World, which impressed him profoundly, particularly the quality of editing in the movie, Coppola decided that he would not go into theater but would opt for cinema. Amongst his classmates were James Caan and Lainie Kazan. He would later cast Caan in The Rain People and in The Godfather.

While pursuing his bachelor's degree, Coppola was elected president of The Green Wig (the university's drama group) and the Kaleidoscopians (its musical comedy club). He then merged the two into The Spectrum Players and under his leadership, they staged a new production each week. Coppola also founded the cinema workshop at Hofstra and contributed prolifically to the campus literary magazine. He won three D. H. Lawrence Awards for theatrical production and direction and received a Beckerman Award for his outstanding contributions to the school's theater arts division. While a graduate student, one of his teachers was Dorothy Arzner, whose encouragement Coppola later acknowledged as pivotal to his film career. He graduated from the University in 1959.