Lucy Mancini

Infobox character
colour = #DEDEE2
name = Lucy Mancini


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first = "The Godfather"
last = "The Godfather Part III"
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gender = Female
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spouse = Dr. Jules Segal
children = Vincent Mancini-Corleone
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portrayer = Jeannie Linero
creator = Mario Puzo

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

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. On paper, she was a millionaire, although she didn't vote her shares in the casinos or otherwise throw her weight around.

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 was caused by a loose vagina — which commonly results from multiple childbirths but in Lucy's case was apparently congenital — and can be fixed with simple vaginal surgery (Puzo goes so far as to name the procedures: colporrhaphy and perineorrhaphy, consistently misspelled as "perincorrhaphy" in several editions of the book). It had been previously stated that Sonny's wife refused to have sex with him because of his abnormally large penis and how that made intercourse painful, a dilemma not shared by Lucy. After a colleague in Los Angeles performs the operation, Lucy is finally able to enjoy sex with Jules, and the two presumably live happily ever after.

Dr. Segal had begun a brilliant career at a university hospital on the East Coast but had gotten blacklisted for performing abortions. He then 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 a maxillofacial surgeon, who repairs the facial bones that had been broken by the late Captain McCluskey and never properly repaired, which had plagued him with sinus problems for over two years. The same surgeon operates on Johnny Fontaine's vocal cords removing small tumors that turn out to be benign, and restores his lost singing voice, allowing him to resume his singing career.

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 Vinnie to join the family for a group photo.

Also, in "The Godfather", Fredo greets Michael on his arrival in Las Vegas, remarking "That doctor did a good job on your face. It looks great!" without explaining how Michael had met "that doctor": a matter that takes up several pages in the book.