ITALIA COPPOLA PASSES AWAY

LA Times  ::  1/22/04

Italia Pennino Coppola, the mother of Academy Award-winning filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire, has died. She was 91. 

Coppola died January 21 of natural causes, according to a family statement. "In a family of artists, she brought the magic to our family's creativity," Francis Ford Coppola told the San Francisco Chronicle. When the family lived on Long Island in New York, she would give her teenage son money to attend Broadway matinees. "My father didn't really take my interest in the theater seriously," he said. "But my mother subsidized it." 

She appeared in non-speaking roles in Coppola's "One From the Heart" and "The Godfather, Part II." She also was remembered for her Italian cooking. She published a cookbook, "Mama Coppola's Pasta Book," and the family has a line of pasta and sauces named for her nickname, "Mammarella," and bearing her photograph as a teenager. 

Born in 1912 in Brooklyn, her father was Francesco Pennino, who composed popular Italian songs and also ran a movie theater. She married Academy Award-winning Hollywood composer and conductor Carmine Coppola, who died in 1991. 

In addition to Francis and Talia, she is survived by a son, August Floyd Coppola of Savannah, Ga., a former dean of the College of Creative Arts at San Francisco State University. She also was the grandmother of actor Nicolas Cage, actress and director Sofia Coppola, six other grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.