The nephew of film demigod Francis Ford Coppola and the brother of Nicolas Cage, Christopher Coppola caught the family filmmaking bug early on and reportedly began shooting Super-8 narratives (many starring his soon-to-be-famous sibling) at a tender age. Coppola demonstrated a particularly strong affinity for musical composition, as well, and in fact majored in that subject (in lieu of cinema studies) as an undergraduate at Redlands College in California before doing graduate work in film at the San Francisco Art Institute. Coppola bowed with his first feature credit exactly one year after graduation -- the 1988 horror film Dracula's Widow -- but despite a truly interesting cast including Josef Sommer (in a rare lead), Lenny von Dohlen, and Sylvia Kristel, and an unusual premise, the film was critically panned. Coppola then proceeded to craft an ongoing series of pictures offering an inventive variation on a traditional genre and distinctly evoked films of Hollywood past; among many other projects, for example, he reworked the post-noir thriller with Deadfall (1993), the Western with Gunfighter (1997), and the Hollywood melodrama with Bel Air (2000). Coppola's directorial efforts culminated in his film Bloodhead (2004), which he directed, edited, and produced; starring cult icons Lynda Carter and Frank Gorshin, it tells of a bizarre creature terrorizing the residents of a small desert town.
Beginning in the late '90s (in 1998), Coppola also essayed a series of acting roles, usually bit parts that found him parlaying his beefy, brawny, and imposing frame into a series of tough-natured characterizations. Credits include Forbidden Warrior (2004), Postal (2007), and BloodRayne 2: Deliverance (2007).
