Nepo parents

Zach Schonfeld on the rise of the self-aware celebrity parent with some talent of their own.

Catherine Scorsese has a near-perfect filmography. Though she didn’t begin acting until her 50s, the character actress fleetingly appeared in a slate of Italian-American classics—Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Moonstruck—before being immortalized in Goodfellas, where, in one of the film’s greatest comic interludes, she plays Joe Pesci’s doting, dog-painting mother. 

She didn’t have much trouble landing the role of a beloved Italian-American matriarch: She was Martin Scorsese’s real-life mother, essentially playing herself. (When she asked what she should cook for the gangsters, Marty replied: “Make pasta and beans, just like you used to make for me.”) Later, she memorably appeared in Casino, playing another wiseguy’s mother.

Catherine Scorsese is the quintessential example of what I like to call a “nepo parent.” Everyone’s sick of hearing about nepo babies and their reign in Hollywood, but what about the inverse phenomenon? A nepo parent, to my mind, is any parent whose career or cultural prominence has been significantly boosted by their child's fame—basically, nepotism in reverse. 

While nepo babies carry the shame of eroding meritocracy, nepo parents are far too sweet and adorable to get mad at. Consider Dave Grohl’s late mother, Virginia Hanlon Grohl, a former English teacher who became a media sensation in 2017 when she published a book about the mothers of rock stars. 

Or consider Francis Ford Coppola’s father, Carmine Coppola, a long-frustrated composer and flautist who finally made it big (and won an Academy Award) when his auteur son hired him to score The Godfather Part II. Look at Francis clapping like a seal when his dad won an Oscar. Isn’t that straight-up wholesome?

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