Daddy's girl

Sofia Coppola lived a charmed life as a child. She was brought up in a very close Italian family with two brothers, a doting mother - and a superstar father. Her father, the film director Francis Ford Coppola, would surprise his children by inviting an animal tamer to bring tiger cubs round for them to play with.

They lived in a 28-room mansion overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and then on a 1,700-acre Napa Valley estate. The family always accompanied Coppola during shooting - while he was filming Apocalypse Now, Sofia played in the Philippines jungle on set, looked after by her mother, Eleanor. 'I think my childhood was very magical when I look back on it. We were living in all these different places or we would be back at Napa. And my dad was like a big kid and he was always fun. And he took us everywhere. Even when he went to Cannes for the film festival we would all tag along with him.'

The idyll came to an end when her brother, Coppola's eldest son Giancarlo, was killed in a freak accident during the filming of Gardens of Stone in 1986. Gio, as he was known, was considered to be his father's natural successor as a director but he died in a motorboat disaster with Ryan O'Neal's son at the helm. Giancarlo was 22 at the time and Sofia only 15.

She acknowledges that it was this tragedy that led her to film-making. Her first success as a director was in adapting The Virgin Suicides, a book that explores the way in which the lives, and deaths, of five sisters impact on those around them.

'The death of my brother obviously had a huge impact on my life. It changed the way I looked at things. The Virgin Suicides is about loss. But what particularly appealed to me about the book was the idea that everyone's life, however short, is there for a reason.'

Before her move into filmmaking, Sofia, now 32, was famous (or infamous) as an actress. From an early age, the zealous Francis Ford Coppola had been involved in his daughter's career. He decided that acting might be her calling and gave her the part of the baby boy christened at the end of The Godfather. She appeared as a little sister in both Peggy Sue Got Married and Rumble Fish. But her big break came at 18 when he asked her to replace an ailing Winona Ryder as Mary Corleone in the final part of The Godfather trilogy. As Coppola said: 'Obviously, the kind of daughter I wanted for Michael [Corleone] was my own daughter, because I was thinking: "If I were Michael, and I had this nice daughter, she'd be sort of like Sofia. She'd be beautiful, but she wouldn't be movie-star beautiful. She'd be Italian, so in her face you could see Sicily." '

Unfortunately for Sofia, the result was a critical disaster. Her acting was panned as 'catatonic', 'painful to watch and even more painful to listen to'. She admits: 'I am not comfortable in front of the camera. I definitely prefer to watch.'

Understandably, she moved away from acting and for the next ten years appeared to drift. 'Something I remember from my early twenties is that kind of existential meltdown when you can't figure out what to do,' says Sofia. 'It was so overwhelming, all the different options and what other people want you to be and what your family wants you to be.' Confused, she started a course at art school, dropped out, dabbled in photography, and shot for French Vogue and American Interview magazine.

She created her own TV show, High Octane, an offbeat news-magazine show on cable, with her close friend Zoe Cassavetes, daughter of the film director John, whom she met while modelling for Steven Meisel, but it got canned after only four episodes. Then she launched a clothing company Milk Fed with an old school chum Stephanie Hayman. The clothes are still being made, even though they are now only sold in Japan. 'I try everything once,' she says. 'I think the more things you try, it gives you a little more awareness.'

In person, Sofia, sitting on the sofa in a Bloomsbury office immaculately dressed in a blue-green Balenciaga wool dress and shiny black pumps, is strangely timid. She's naturally shy and quiet (indeed Cassavetes said when they met: 'She's so quiet that I thought she might be a jerk') who gives off a sense of intense discomfort at being scrutinised, but has nevertheless managed to collaborate with an impressive group of people. She's a muse for Marc Jacobs, having appeared in one of his perfume ads and designed a canvas bag for his Marc line. She directed the raunchy music video for White Stripes that featured Kate Moss pole-dancing in her underwear in the basement of Manhattan's Mercer Hotel.