Eleanor Coppola is the wife of the famed director Francis Ford Coppola.

Coppola was born Eleanor Jessie Neil to an Irish-American family in Los Angeles. She met Francis Ford Coppola on the set of his directorial debut, Dementia 13 in 1962, where she was Assistant Art Director. They married a year later. They had three children, including filmmakers/directors Sofia Coppola, Roman Coppola, and Gian-Carlo Coppola (deceased).

A former graduate student in Applied Design at UCLA, she is active in the restoration and management of the family's historic Rubicon Estate Winery in Rutherford, California, and designs costumes and stage decor for the Oberlin Dance Company of San Francisco.

During the making of Apocalypse Now which began in 1976, she kept extensive notes which were published in 1979 as Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now, ISBN 0-87910-150-4. She also shot film behind the scenes which eventually in 1990 was turned into Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. She and her 1990 co-directors, Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper were awarded an Emmy Award for "Outstanding Individual Achievement - Informational Programming - Directing".

While at UCLA she was a member of Alpha Chi Omega women's fraternity (Alpha Psi chapter), and is considered one of that chapter's most famous alumnae.