Lucy Mancini
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Lucy Mancini is a fictional character in Mario Puzo's The Godfather. She was portrayed by Jeannie Linero in The Godfather and The Godfather Part III.
She was one of the childhood friends of Vito Corleone's children, particularly his daughter, Connie. She was the maid of honor at Connie's wedding. Lucy had sex with Sonny at the wedding, and had a brief extramarital affair with him. The novel and the films diverge with regard to their respective treatments of Lucy's fate after Sonny's death.
In the novel, Lucy is a fairly important supporting character, with several chapters dedicated to her story. After Sonny is killed, Lucy is sent to Las Vegas by Vito's consigliere, Tom Hagen. There she is given a small share in one of the family's hotels, primarily so that she can keep an eye on Vito's middle son, Fredo, who is learning the hotel business.
Eventually, she establishes a whole new life for herself in Las Vegas, and becomes largely independent of the Corleone clan. She is very lonely, however, and occasionally pines for Sonny; while she did not love him or even really know him, she misses him as a lover, and cannot achieve sexual satisfaction with anyone else. That changes when she meets, falls in love with, and marries a surgeon, Jules Segal, who explains that her difficulty in reaching orgasm can be fixed with a simple vaginal surgery. After a colleague in Los Angeles the operation, Lucy is finally able to enjoy sex, and the two presumably live happily ever after. This surgeon had begun a brilliant career at a university hospital but had gotten blacklisted for performing abortions. He had found work at one of the Corleone hotels for several years, among other things doing abortions on showgirls impregnated by Fredo Corleone. Dr Segal also refers Michael Corleone to another surgeon, who repairs the facial bones broken by the late Capt. McCluskey, which had plagued him for over two years. (The same surgeon operates on Johnny Fontaine's vocal cords]] ard restores his lost singing voice, allowing him to resume his singing career.
In Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptations, however, Lucy's role is minimal. She is seen as a young woman in Part I of Coppola's Godfather saga, but her character is not followed after Sonny's death. She does not appear in The Godfather Part II. In The Godfather Part III, she is present in a manner inconsistent with her fate as described in The Godfather novel. In that film, Lucy is the mother of Sonny's illegitimate child, Vincent, who eventually succeeds Michael Corleone as the head of the Corleone crime family. She appears briefly as a guest in the party scene near the beginning of the film, beaming as Michael invites Vinnie to join the family for a group photo. Curiously, the same actress, Jeannie Linero, plays Lucy Mancini as a lustful bridesmaid and as Vincent's respectable mother decades later.
