Vito Corleone

In 1945, on the day his daughter marries, Vito hears requests for favors in his study, because nobody can be refused at the Don's daughter's wedding. He treats friends as family and the law as an enemy. But he turns down the narcotics deal that Sollozzo offers, and the refusal costs him. Vito is shot in the street outside the fruit stand where he was buying oranges, and he survives. His sons go to war to avenge him. Once he recovers, he asks the other families for peace. At the end of his life, he dies in a tomato garden, playing with his grandson.

With his son Sonny dead, Vito gathers the five families and accepts peace so Michael can come home. At home, he talks to Michael like a man saying goodbye. He tells him whoever proposes a meeting will be the traitor and that, sooner or later, the business will be legal. Vito dies soon after, and Michael takes over.

Vito is born Andolini, in Corleone, Sicily. The local boss kills his father for defiance and then kills his older brother. His mother dies pleading for mercy, and the boy sneaks off to the United States. At Ellis Island, the clerk writes his town down as his surname, and the boy becomes Vito Corleone. Sick, he is put in quarantine and watches New York from a window. He grows up in Little Italy, working at a grocery, in a neighborhood where one man rules everything.

Years later, Vito is married with a family, working at a grocery. The mobster Fanucci shakes down the whole neighborhood and gets him fired. Vito, who refuses to pay, plans to kill Fanucci on a festival night and does. The neighborhood begins to see him as the man who solves problems. He sets up an olive oil company, Genco, and grows by helping people who have nowhere else to turn. In 1925, he goes back to Sicily to settle scores with the boss who killed his family.

Vito was born in Mario Puzo's 1969 novel The Godfather, which already covers his youth. Marlon Brando won the Oscar for Best Actor for playing him in 1972. Robert De Niro won Best Supporting Actor for young Vito in 1974. There are no more films with him after Part II.