The Young and the Restless Character Recap: Lily Winters

By the time she turned 20, The Young and the Restless‘ Lily Winters had already survived a broken home, an abusive relationship, and a disastrous marriage. Truth be told, she fared no better in the subsequent decade.

Who Is Lily Winters?

Lily Amanda’s ushering into the world was fraught with tension as her true paternity remained suspect. Drucilla hoped beyond hope that husband Neil was the child’s natural father but the honest truth was that his brother Malcolm was the more likely candidate.

Between the self-recrimination over her unintentional infidelity and her inability to conform to Neil’s Neanderthal opinions on a woman’s place in society, Drucilla determined that she had but one option – pack her and Lily’s luggage and bid both her husband and Genoa City adieu.

Growing Pains

For the next decade and a half, mother and daughter resided in Paris. Lily matured from precocious youngster to wild child hellion whose frequent brushes with the law and flippant attitude eventually spurred Drucilla to return to her daughter’s place of birth.

Drucilla hoped that Neil could talk some sense into the errant young woman but was disheartened to discover that her ex had backslid into drunken debauchery. The two eventually reunited, though it was to Lily’s great chagrin – she had wanted her mother to marry psychiatrist Wesley Carter.

Victimization

Thanks to the World Wide Web, Lily made the acquaintance of Kevin Fisher, and a cyber romance blossomed. When the two met in the real world, Lily was dismayed to find that her crush was more frog than Prince Charming.

Kevin – quite a few years Lily’s senior – pestered and pressured her into having sex with him, and subsequently, an even more volatile and dangerous side to his personality emerged.

A fearful Lily fond solace in two new girlfriends, Colleen Carlton and Sierra Hoffman, though all three would eventually fall victim to Kevin’s campaign of terror and intimidation.

Family Is What You Make Of It

After finally extricating herself from her ex’s malignant influence, Lily turned her attention to the local Rec Center, where she met troubled teen Devon Hamilton. After discovering that the young man was about to be shuttered from another foster family to what amounted to a detention facility, Lily convinced Drucilla and Neil to take Devon in and adopt him.

Love On The Run

The next man to turn Lily’s head was Daniel Romalotti, the son of Phyllis Summers – Drucilla’s mortal enemy. The teens fell madly in love, and when Daniel was falsely accused of causing Cassie Newman’s death, they hit the road together.

The Marrying Kind

Eventually, they were caught, brought back to Genoa City, and separated, with Lily being shipped off to boarding school. However, the pair eventually reunited and eloped to Las Vegas.

For a time, the marriage was a happy one but an eventual series of insurmountable hurdles – the revelation that Malcolm was indeed Lily’s biological father, Drucilla and Neil’s inevitable estrangement, the murder of Neil’s new gal pal, Carmen, and Daniel’s addiction to internet porn – proved their undoing.

In time, Lily’s broken heart mended, and she found herself falling for Cane Ashby. The budding relationship was nearly decimated thanks to the machinations of Chloe Mitchell but, in the end, love won out. Even the outing of Cane’s true identity – turns out, he really wasn’t Phillip Chancellor III – couldn’t deter the pair from getting hitched.

Medical Maladies and Miracle Babies

Aside from contracting chlamydia during her long-ago dalliance with Kevin, Lily had remained a relatively healthy young woman. However, during her marriage to Cane, Lily was diagnosed with, battled, and survived ovarian cancer.

The struggle was a long and arduous one, and by the time remission was achieved, Lily had submitted to not only numerous rounds of chemotherapy but a hysterectomy as well.

Despite fears that she would now never realize her dream to become a mother, Lily soon welcomed twins Charlie and Mattie into the fold after she and Cane agreed to accept Mackenzie Browning’s offer to be a surrogate.

Lily Winters, Jail-bird

Further complications disrupted the Ashby marriage. First, a past associate of Cane’s arrived in town and stalked the couple, and then Cane was presumed to have been shot and killed, only to resurface with the explanation that it was his twin who died. Later, the twins were kidnapped, and Lily found herself being held hostage.

The couple even managed to survive Cane’s extra-marital affair with Juliet Helton and the surprise baby that resulted from it. But the union was well and truly over once Lily was tried, convicted, and imprisoned for the vehicular homicide of Hilary Curtis, her rival and sister-in-law.

After her release, Lily served as the prison’s GED tutor.

Later, Jill (Jess Walton) hired Lily to help run Chancellor, and the company briefly merged with Winters, but demerged.