August Floyd Coppola was an American academic, author, film executive, and advocate for the arts. He was the brother of director Francis Ford Coppola and the father of actor Nicolas Cage.
Coppola received his undergraduate degree at UCLA and his graduate degree at Hofstra University, where his thesis Ernest Hemingway: The Problem of In Our Time was published in 1956. Coppola earned his doctorate at Occidental College in 1960. He taught comparative literature at Cal State Long Beach in the 1960s and '70s and served as a trustee of the California State University system before moving to San Francisco in 1984. He then served as Dean of Creative Arts at San Francisco State University. In this role, Coppola earned a reputation of being a champion of the arts on the campus and in the community, and for promoting diversity within the student body of the arts school. Additionally, August Coppola worked in film, like many other members of his family. He was an executive at his brother's American Zoetrope film studio, where he was involved in the revival of Abel Gance's 1927 silent filmNapoléon. He was the founder and president of the San Francisco Film and Video Arts Commission, and served on the jury of the 36th Berlin International Film Festival in 1986. Also, Coppola served as chairman and CEO of Education First!, an organization seeking Hollywood studio support of educational programs. Coppola also worked as an advocate for art appreciation among the visually impaired. He is credited as being the creator of the Tactile Dome, a feature at the San Francisco Exploratorium museum, which opened to the public on September 9, 1971. The Dome is a lightless maze that requires visitors to pass through using only their sense of touch. In 1972 Coppola opened the AudioVision Workshop with colleague Professor Gregory Frazier, which utilized Frazier's original process of audio recording descriptions of film and theater action for the benefit of visually impaired audiences. Coppola was the author of the romantic novel The Intimacy.
Personal life
Coppola married German-American dancer Joy Vogelsang in 1960; they had three sons: Marc, Christopher, and Nicolas. Among his nieces and nephews are director Sofia Coppola and actor Jason Schwartzman. Coppola and Vogelsang divorced in 1976. He married Marie Thenevin on April 16, 1981. That marriage ended in 1986. His last marriage was to, an actress with the Comédie-Française in Paris. Coppola's final home was in Los Angeles, where he died of a heart attack on October 27, 2009 at age 75.
Legacy
The 150-seat August Coppola Theater on the San Francisco StateUniversity campus is named in his honor. Francis Ford Coppola dedicated his 1983 filmRumble Fish to him. Nicolas Cage partially based his idea for the film The Sorcerer's Apprentice and his character Balthazar on his father August Coppola. The closing credits read "With Memories of Dr. August Coppola".
