American motion-picture director, writer, and producer whose films range from sweeping epics to small-scale character studies.

Confined to bed with polio at age nine, Coppola devised puppet shows for his own entertainment. After taking a graduate degree in film at the University of California at Los Angeles, he worked for a time with director Roger Corman in the production of low-budget horror films. Coppola's first independent directorial efforts—Tonight for Sure (1961), Dementia 13 (1963), and You're a Big Boy Now (1967)—met with mixed critical and popular reaction, but the musical Finian's Rainbow (1968) enjoyed considerable success. Coppola received an Academy Award for his screenplay of Patton (1970), a film about the controversial American general of World War II.

Coppola directed and cowrote The Godfather (1972). This film, which was based on a novel by Mario Puzo, won virtually unanimous critical acclaim and numerous awards (including three Academy Awards) and proved enormously popular at the box office. The epic drama, remarkable for its accomplished performances and visual authenticity, transformed the inner workings of the organized-crime subculture into a metaphor for corruption on a larger scale. It was followed by The Conversation (1974), a penetrating portrait of one man's involvement in the electronic-surveillance business. The Godfather, Part II of the same year received seven Academy Awards. Another sequel, The Godfather, Part III, appeared in 1990.

Coppola's most controversial—and, at the time, most costly—film, Apocalypse Now (1979), was a transposition of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness to a Vietnam War setting. The film won two of the eight Academy Awards for which it was nominated. In the decades following that success, Coppola directed such films as One from the Heart (1982), a musical set in a soundstage re-creation of Las Vegas; Rumble Fish and The Outsiders (both 1983), which treated themes of underprivileged adolescence; The Cotton Club (1984), noted for its jazz score; Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), a retelling of the vampire legend; and The Rainmaker (1997), which adapted a legal thriller by novelist John Grisham. The surrealistic Youth Without Youth, Coppola's first directorial effort in 10 years, was released in 2007. The film, which he also cowrote, centres on an elderly professor whose youth returns after he is struck by lightning.

Coppola's extended family includes several in the motion-picture industry, such as his nephew Nicolas Cage, an actor, and his daughter Sofia, also a filmmaker. Coppola produced many of the films he directed and, even when not directing, had many producerial successes, including American Graffiti (1973), directed by George Lucas (Lucas, George); The Black Stallion (1979), directed by Caroll Ballard; and Lost in Translation (2003), directed by Sofia Coppola.