Sonny Corleone
fictional character from The Godfather series
Santino "Sonny" Corleone is a fictional character in Mario Puzo's 1969 novel The Godfather and its 1972 film adaptation.
He is the eldest son of the mafia boss don Vito Corleone and Carmela Corleone. He has two brothers, Fredo and Michael, and a sister, Connie. In the film, Sonny was portrayed by James Caan, who briefly reprised his role for a flashback scene in The Godfather Part II.
Director Francis Ford Coppola's son Roman Coppola played Sonny as a boy in the 1920s scenes of The Godfather Part II.
Novel and film biography
In both the novel and the film, Sonny is the eldest of Vito Corleone's four children. Unlike his quiet, level-headed father, Sonny is hot-tempered and prone to violence.
At age 16, Sonny commits a robbery. When Peter Clemenza, one of Vito's caporegimes and Sonny's godfather, informs Vito about it, Vito demands his son explain himself. Sonny replies that he had witnessed Vito murder the "Black Hand" gangster Don Fanucci years before, and he now wants to "learn how to sell olive oil". Vito knows what Sonny really means, and sends him to Clemenza for training.
Sonny "makes his bones" at age 19.
The public source identifies “Sonny Corleone” as fictional character from The Godfather series. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Sonny, Corleone and fictional.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sonny Corleone” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.