Just six months after Tally's birth, the family moved.  Life in the Coppola household revolved around Carmine's tempestuous musical career.  They moved often, even in the New York area - so much so that the children lost track of the number of schools they'd attended.  "When I say I’m from Long Island, I mean all over it. We moved about 22 times," Talia remembers.

The Coppolas relished their Italian origins, especially the heritage of music and painting, but they reared their children in the mold of genuine Americans, encouraging them to become doctors and lawyers.  Rubbing shoulders with these overachieving relatives encouraged young Talia to take a back seat and not to worry. She felt nothing was at stake for her.  Having such celebrated older brothers "makes two geniuses and one girl," she later quipped.  "In an Italian family, once you get that 'she's the baby' stuck on you, it's hard to shake.  Your opinion is invited, but you have to sort of sneak it in and speak in a small voice.  I must say, it's very tiring.  I don't' think I've ever raised my voice to those two.  But that's okay.  We women endure.  I got to emerge later on."

Talia felt great sympathy for her father, who for much of his life was unable to translate prodigious ability into professional fulfillment. Francis Coppola described his father as being for many years a "frustrated and often unemployed man who hated anybody who was successful." Talia loved her father, and his frustrations depressed her as a child. She recalls standing in long Christmastime lines at Radio City Music Hall, where her father was a sometime arranger.  These were the family's halcyon days, Talia remembers "half a dozen golden childhood years.  Mother was loving and magical and so alive.  She didn't need to put on a play - she was the play."

"I felt a need to act out rituals like that," she said. "I saw my father’s frustration, and I might very well have been acting out something about that. I was brought up a Catholic - I became an ex-Catholic - but somehow for me the message of the Catholic Church was, if you have talent, deny it. That’s some great act of love. It’s the ultimate gift: not to use your gift. It became, for me, doing penance, and it became very thrilling actually. I had the desire not to be seen. I guess it was the desire not to be alive, to get as small as possible until you don’t exist."

"How could I be happy when this great man was not getting his turn? He was a great flutist, first flutist with Toscanini. But he didn’t want to be a flutist: he thought of it as a curse. When I was in high school, when musical comedies were the great American art form, he had an obsession about musical comedy. But he never got his musical comedy. There were just a lot of road shows, and he was very unhappy."

Talia also remembers some unhappiness on her part, too, and in childhood she was very much into self-denial.  "It affected my whole life.  I had this thing about denying myself things, as if it would be a sin to assert myself.  It goes back to Catholic school.  I was one of the few Italians in the class and sister would stand me up in front of 70 kids and point out that I was the only kid in the room with the wrong name.  Talia isn't a saint's name - and I felt so ashamed!"

Tally says she became an actress in her bedroom, where she acted out her own fantasies and roles in actual plays. She revered "The Glass Menagerie" role of Laura, who, because of crippling shyness, "couldn’t go to school and went every day to the park instead." As she grew older, she began acting on the streets.

"I would sometimes go into the streets, and if there was a cab driver who needed a conversation, I’d give him the right one. I went to Christian Science meetings on Wednesdays. There were nothing but old people there, and they desperately needed to hear somebody who had a bigtime disease. So I had the bigtime disease. Maybe those were lies, I don’t know. But I learned more about acting then."

During her teenage years, Talia dropped in and out of school, developing rebelliousness to conquer her shyness, then groping toward a first shimmer of the courage to have an ambition.

"At first I didn’t dare to have the ambition to be a professional actress. I wanted to be a choreographer. I loved ballet. I loved listening to music late at night and thinking of contemporary dance."

In her family it was accepted practice to declare a goal. So at about 19, momentarily vanquishing her lack of assertiveness, she declared that she would attend the Yale School of Drama, which had offered her a scholarship.

Brother Francis was against the idea and didn’t think she should be an actress at all. "He wanted me to follow him and be a writer and director. He was worried about actresses because, in terms of tradition in this country, actresses don’t come out happy as a rule." But if she was determined, Francis thought, she should just attend acting classes and auditions and try to practice her craft in stage plays.

She later realized that this was wise advice. In her opinion, the Yale School of Drama didn’t offer "a great course of study, oddly enough." In the middle of her second year, she dropped out and fled across the country, sputtering into Hollywood in her battered, single-geared MG.

In Los Angeles, Talia lived for a while on what she could earn in small acting and screenwriting jobs and some money her parents sent so he could attend various classes. Most of her jobs were with Roger Corman, with whom Francis had gotten his start in the early 1960s. Corman was a producer of inexpensive, quickly churned-out horror movies. Tally landed a few bit parts in such pictures.

Still struggling with guilt over her ambition, she attended a Hollywood party in 1969, around her 23rd birthday, and met a young composer named David Shire.

"A voice said, ‘That’s the person.’ He was taking everybody’s phone number but mine, including my roommate’s. He had been warned that actresses are ‘confused’. So I simply waited and called him up and asked him out. It turned out he had been interested in me. He just dated my roommate in order to come up and see if I was crazy or not."

"From the time we first dated, we were always together. Six months later, I asked him to marry me."  The couple wed on March 29, 1970.

As for David Shire, though he would do much composing for film, TV and the theatre, it is arguably as a songwriter that he had his greatest success. He won the Oscar for the song "It Goes Like It Goes" in the movie Norma Rae and went on to score dozens of movies, including All the President’s Men and Saturday Night Fever.  

David's new bride craved stability and marriage finally gave it to her. Professionally, Talia relapsed for a short period into her attitude of self-denial. Her brother Francis was on his way to becoming an imposing figure on the Hollywood scene; around the time of her marriage he signed a contract with Paramount to direct The Godfather. But Talia felt that asking him to use his growing influence on her behalf would be an infringement on the brother-sister relationship.

She finally decided to ask Francis for a screen test. Once successfully completed, it was shown to a number of influential people involved with the upcoming film and received positive reviews. They wanted to cast her as Connie, the young sister of the Corleone family. But Francis didn’t. One reason was that she had been so retiring about her acting ambitions that Francis wasn’t sure she was serious about them.

"Francis' position was still insecure then - he could have been fired any day," she says.  Coppola himself explains: "I figured that I was probably not going to direct The Godfather - that I was going to be ousted - so I thought that at least it would be good if my little sister got the part.  I cast her.  I wouldn't have stood between her and the role, and I was happy that she was in the film."

Talia says of her brother, "he also thought I was wrong for the part. He thought when you open up with this wedding scene, Connie should be this chunky girl, so that you understand immediately the guy is marrying her to get into the family, not because he is attracted to her. I didn’t see her that way. I saw her as nervous and neurotic and representative of a different kind of ugliness, the way it was written in the book."

Francis Coppola explains that he "thought Tally was too beautiful to be Connie Corleone.  The whole plot idea was that Connie was somewhat plain, and here came Carlo, a good-looking guy, marrying the don's homely daughter. Tally tested very well, but she was beautiful, so I wasn't enthusiastic about her playing the part."

Talia observed that while she didn’t particularly like Connie Corleone, she empathized with her: "I identified with her frustration in a male family, not being able to have a particular place."

In the end, she was hired as Talia Shire, not Talia Coppola as she had been billed in her previous films.  Shortly thereafter, the principle cast members of The Godfather gathered in a private room at the back of Patsy's, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan.  The get-together, intended by Francis Coppola to be part rehearsal and part informal dinner, was designed to show cast members what Italian family life was like.  To create this effect, Talia served the pasta while Marlon Brando, never stepping out of character, presided over the table.

In the coming months, though, the shooting itself became a difficult time for Tally. "Everyone on the set was talking about how I was a sister," she said later. "That’s hard, awfully hard."  Despite the awkwardness of her position, even Tally's parents got in on the act and were included in the film.  Father Carmine appears in two scenes, first as a restaurant patron in the Sollozzo/McCluskey shooting scene, and later, in an entirely different role, as a piano player in the mattress scene, which found Corleone family members hiding during the gang wars immediately following the shooting.  Italia Coppola did double duty as well, appearing with her husband in the restaurant scene and playing a switchboard operator at Vito Corleone's Genco Olive Oil office.  Coppola also worked his immediate family into the picture, assigning his wife and two sons parts as extras in the crucial baptism scene.  The baby in the scene was none other than Coppola's three-week-old daughter, Sofia, now an Academy Award winner herself.

To her brother's delight, Talia was admirable in her role, turning in a portrayal impressive enough to earn her the same part in the movie's two sequels.

Just two years later, Coppola started work on the second Godfather installment.  In this picture, the abused Connie Corleone has turned into a racy society flame, jumping from one man to another, going on to disappoint her older brother Michael (Al Pacino), which, as the film illustrates, is clearly not the thing to do.

During the course of the film, Michael's wife Kay (Diane Keaton), disgusted by her husband's behavior, confronts him.  The two quarrel, and Kay reveals that she did not have a miscarriage, as she had previously reported to her husband.  Unable to bear the prospects of having more of Michael's children, she had the baby aborted. 

This particular plot twist, remembers Talia, was one of her major contributions to The Godfather: Part II.  According to her, the original script called for Kay to bear Michael a son, only to leave with him when she left her husband.  To Shire, this didn't ring true.  "We were all up at Lake Tahoe, and Francis was writing the scene.  And I said, 'You know, Francis, Kay would never have the baby and run off with him.  She would terminate the pregnancy - which is a very brutal thing to do - and say, 'I cannot carry your line.'  And Francis said, 'You know, you're right!'  What Francis did was give me a huge gift for that suggestion: one of the movie's most beautiful speeches, which comes later in the movie, when I walk across the room and kneel at Michael's feet and say, 'You know, we've never gotten along . . . '  That scene gave me hope for an Oscar nomination."

Talia's performance in that scene was spectacular and her hopes for the Oscar were well-founded.  Nominated she was, and on Oscar night 1975, Godfather II blew out the competition.  Francis Coppola took the stage three times to accept statuettes for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Director and Carmine Coppola shared an Oscar with Nino Rota for Best Musical Score.  'If it wasn't for Francis Coppola," Carmine announced that night, "I wouldn't be here tonight.  However, if it wasn't for me, he wouldn't be here."  The packed house at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion ate it up.

Italia Coppola, however, was not amused.  Her daughter had been nominated for Best Supporting Actress but had lost to Ingrid Bergman (Murder On the Orient Express), and Mrs. Coppola felt that her husband and son might have been more sensitive when giving their acceptance speeches.

"Francis is jumping in the air saying, 'This is the best night in our lives!'  Well, Tally lost that night, and she said, 'I'm a girl, so you forgot about me.'  Then Carmine gave his speech about how if it wasn't for him, Francis wouldn't be here.  I said to him afterward, 'Gee, Carmine, you did a great job.  I hope the labor pains weren't too bad.'"

According to Talia, her mother was looking for a little recognition herself.  "When Francis was giving his acceptance speech, my mother wanted him to say ' . . . and to my mother, Italia Pennino Coppola.'  She wanted some of her old friends, who hadn't seen her in all these years, to know what happened to her."

Tally's successes in the Godfather films should have given her a sense of security, but about the time she got her Oscar nomination her life took an unexpected turn.

"Up until that period, I’d never had any chutzpah, I could never bring myself to say what I wanted. Then finally I did say it, and a few months later I got the Oscar nomination. And an hour after I was nominated, less than an hour, I found out I was pregnant."

At first, she was less than ecstatic. The pregnancy appeared to create a conflict between her home life and her suddenly promising career.

"People started to say, ‘Oh, you’re going to lose your momentum.’ I said no, a baby was something I’d always wanted and had begun to think I couldn’t have. It was just going to have to work."

And it did. Matthew Orlando Shire was born September 18, 1975.  "All actresses should have babies," says Talia.  "There are certain dynamics that change when you have a baby. For me, there was a kind of confidence I hadn’t had before. I’d come of age. The baby of the family had had a baby. I’d finally left my family and had a family of my own."  Shortly after taking her new baby home, however, Talia and her husband noticed that the child had a curious yellow hue to his skin and promptly took him to a Beverly Hills doctor who dismissed their claims of illness.  Three days later, however, little Matthew was in the hospital in intensive care - he was suffering from a severe case of blood poisoning - a crisis which could easily have been prevented had it been diagnosed earlier.  Talia recalls: "I heard myself saying, 'I love you, Michael'.  I knew then that I wasn't going to let this kid go."  The new parents agonized in the hospital for days, until a miracle, Talia says, saved her son.  

Within weeks of Matthew's recovery, Tally was slipping into what is likely her best known and most beloved role - Adrian Balboa.  Adrian, she says, was the role that marked the beginning of her best work.

Sylvester Stallone remembers the early days of Rocky's pre-production: "We were having difficulty casting the role of Adrian . . . I had remembered Talia Shire from The Godfather and asked that she come in.  She came in.  She wore glasses, her hair was short and dark; she was almost the opposite of the way I had pictured Adrian.  She came in with enthusiasm and gave one of the finer improvisational readings I had seen since working on the film.  And at the very end of the improvisation, she reeled back and gave me a couple shots in the jaw playfully, as though she were a fighter.  I felt that she had achieved near total control over the character even in this sort span of time and I wanted her badly and screamed and yelled and made everyone around me uncomfortable until finally they said, 'Okay, you've got her!' which was an incredibly great coup for all of us."

"I got those clothes myself; a lot of them were mine," Talia recalls of Adrian's wardrobe, which made such a strong impression during her reading. "Thank God (director) John Alvidsen made us go out and get the stuff ourselves; it isn’t done anymore in big films. I think your costume is 20 percent of your performance. Lack of color was what I wanted. I wanted the character to have lack of color - until she wears a red coat, that is, which is the first statement, of ‘look at me.’"

"Her characterization was an absolute reflection of the dismal, depressing atmosphere of [her environment]," Stallone says.  "Considering the circumstances, I was amazed at Tally's concentration.  She had just had a child two months before and it was extremely difficult for her son to be separated from her at such a young age particularly since the child had had serious difficulties in earliest infancy.  Yet we spent our time between shots walking around the block and getting to know one another and getting the feel of Fishtown - that was the nickname of the neighborhood in Kensington where we were shooting - into our sensibilities."

A fast friendship formed, partly due to the fact that Sylvester Stallone, Tally says, "was very reminiscent of all the men in my family.  That’s why I could get along with him so well."  Adrian became a challenge, but one she was ready to meet: "I was playing a small, shy person. I had to do it with confidence or be run off that screen by Mr. Stallone." 

In a scene Talia remembers fondly, Rocky coaxes Adrian into his squalid apartment, gently removes her austere hat and glasses, and delivers the first kiss she has ever received. In that moment, Rocky begins liberating her from the domination of a cruel older brother and her own oppressive lack of self-esteem.

"I’m very proud of that love scene. It was every cliché in the book: the glasses, the girl who has never been in an apartment with a man, everything. I just wanted to try to do my damndest. Because it’s very dear to me, the moment that you decide to surrender to love. It’s really the best moment of all in life, especially for someone like Adrian who has been so humiliated."

Acting without her glasses but with confidence was a big step for Talia - especially considering at least one unglamorous experience she'd had.  As her story goes, on the first day of shooting The Godfather, having just removed her spectacles in the presence of don Marlon Brando (who was eyeing her from the sidelines), Tally walked straight into the camera, knocking it over.  Rocky gave her the mettle to work without them for good.  "Losing the glasses was a big step for me. John Alvidsen insisted that I wear what my prescription is. I wear glasses. I’m legally blind. I know there’s an E on the chart, but I don’t see it. I’ve always been one of the most terrified actresses ever, and I thought not seeing would help my performances. But I realize now it didn’t. I didn’t know where to go. When I put on the glasses, I could see where the camera was, and I began to enjoy acting for the camera."

"After Rocky, I went out and got contact lenses. I’m wearing lenses now. Now I have the courage to see."

Audiences and critics adored Rocky, which went on to win the 1977 Oscar for Best Picture, and among the film's many awards and accolades was a well-deserved second Oscar nomination for Talia, this time for Best Actress.  Although she lost the Academy Award to Faye Dunaway (Network), she managed to take home the New York Film Critics Award, National Board of Review Award, and was nominated for a Golden Globe.

Rocky led to a pair of telefilms in the next two years, the first titled Kill Me If You Can in which she played a legal adviser to Caryl Chessman (ably played by Alan Alda), the convicted killer who was executed in 1960 after spending a dozen years on Death Row; in the film, she proceeds from idealism at 28 to disillusionment at 40.  Next, Talia starred opposite Rocky co-star Burt Young in Daddy, I Don't Like It Like This, a realist story dealing with mental child abuse in an Italian-American family living in New York City.

Now busy at home with her young son and making only one picture per year, Talia was delighted when Sylvester Stallone contacted her in 1979 regarding his next project, the sequel to Rocky.  

Rocky II featured Tally's character more prominently than in the first film.   During Rocky's training for a second match with Apollo Creed, he and Adrian are anticipating the birth of their baby when she suddenly goes into premature labor and lapses into a coma.  Rocky steadfastly remains at her bedside for days and when she finally wakes, the two share a touchingly beautiful scene.

Next came a cult-horror picture entitled Prophecy, a thriller about a health inspector played by Robert Foxworth and his wife (Talia) who are sent to Maine to investigate strange events in the woods only to encounter a savage beast, grown to monstrous size and driven mad by toxic wastes that are poisoning the waters.   Tally is morose during most of the movie, having discovered that she has ingested some of this toxic waste which is sure to mutate her unborn child and morph it into a hideous creature.

With director John Frankenheimer at the helm, writes one reviewer, "this film should have turned out better but as is it's just a disappointment that's mysterious opening sequence and very mild suspense is ruined by a slow-pace, chintzy rubbery effects and a climatic mutant bear rampage that almost single-handedly brings this below average."

Months later, on June 26, 1980, Talia's second son, Jason Francesco Schwartzman was born.  Now that the couple's legal affairs were settled, Talia and Jack Schwartzman were married on August 23, 1980.

With Schwartzman, Tally had made yet another addition to her already lengthy name and briefly toyed with the idea of changing her status one last time.  "Once, I was thinking of going back to Coppola for my professional name.  Sounds nice.  And it's nice, writing all those P's.  I couldn't do it though.  I specifically chose a separate identity from my brother.  I had to.  Of all Talia Coppola Shire Schwartzman's identities, Coppola is the most unpleasant."

With her new husband Jack, Tally formed her own production company called TaliaFilm and the couple teamed up for several projects, including Sean Connery's much-touted return as James Bond in Never Say Never Again, in 1983.  

Also that year, Adrian Balboa appeared on the big screen again, in Sly Stallone's newest creation, Rocky III.  The third chapter of the life of Rocky Balboa finds his lifestyle of wealth and idleness suddenly shaken when a powerful fighter challenges him to a bout.  In this film, Talia's character is given more dialogue than ever before, most of which is concentrated into a single dramatic scene in which she argues with a dejected Rocky and in an effort to re-inspire him, hits hard with her own brand of tough-love. 

Adrian is metamorphisized into quite the glamour-girl from here on in the Rocky series - she looks ravishing in her stylish clothes and fur, is bathed in jewels and gifts from her adoring husband, and the Balboas have grown into a more mature, loving couple.

That same year, Talia and her own adoring husband brought home an early Christmas gift, their second son, Robert Coppola Schwartzman, who was born on Christmas Eve, 1982.

Talia's next project, in 1984, was Rip Van Winkle, one of several films in HBO's "Faerie Tale Theatre" series.  Working yet again with Francis Coppola as director, Talia played the role of Rip's peevish wife.  Shot hurriedly in only five days, Rip Van Winkle featured outré sets designed by Eiko Ishioka, which lent an unfamiliar tint to the folk tale, and subsequently was not understood by most reviewers, despite its distinctive flair of creativity.

Released in November, 1985, Rocky IV brought Adrian Balboa back into the fold again, and this time featured Stallone fighting an unbeatable Russian automaton named Drago (Dolph Lundgren).  This installment finds Rocky maturing, having to deal with a growing family as well as reevaluating his career and his future. The intense battles between Balboa and Drago were representative at the time of the last gasps of the cold war.