Lucy Mancini

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 is one of the childhood friends of Vito Corleone's children, particularly his daughter, Connie. She is the maid of honor at Connie's wedding. Lucy has sex with Vito's son Sonny at the wedding, and has 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

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 interest (five and later ten "points") 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. She also serves as a shareholder-of-record who has no criminal record of her own: several such owners are necessary for a valid gaming license. On paper, she is a millionaire, although she doesn't vote her shares in the casinos.

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 is caused by a loose vagina—which commonly results from multiple childbirths but in Lucy's case is apparently congenital—and can be fixed with a simple vaginal surgery. After Segal's colleague in Los Angeles performs the operation, Lucy is finally able to enjoy sex with her husband, and the two presumably live happily ever after.

In the film

In Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptations, Lucy's role is minimal. She is seen as a young woman in Part I, 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 son, 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 Vincent to join the family for a group photo. In Puzo's novel, however, Sonny does not impregnate her.