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Television comedienne, actress, producer... these words all describe her. Lucille Desiree Ball was born on August 6, 1911, in the small town of Celeron, just outside of Jamestown, New York. At age 15, Ball enrolled in the John Murray Anderson Drama School in New York City.
However, after only twelve months of going there (with Bette Davis as a classmate) the acting coach informed Lucy that she was not talented and should go into a different field, because she'd never make it in acting! She then was a soda fountain clerk at Walgreens Drug Store and also sold hotdogs at the Celeron amusement park. There, she liked to act up for the customers and be silly, but her boss didn't appreciate her antics. She repeatedly auditioned, unsuccessfully, for Broadway chorus lines before turning to modeling. Using the name Diane Belmont, Ball became a model in fashion designer Hattie Carnegie's studio and won national exposure as the Chesterfield Cigarette Girl in 1933. A bad thing happened to Lucy's family in 1927, when Lucy was 16.
They were having a birthday party for her brother, Fred, and Lucy's Grandpa Hunt allowed a girl who had never used a gun before to fire one. When she did, she accidentally hit a neighborhood boy, who ended up paralyzed below the neck. The boy died five years later. They went to court, but the judge in the case ruled the shooting an accident, but still ordered the Ball family to pay all the medical bills. They had to sell their home. From then on, Lucy remained terrified of guns.
From the early 1930 s through the late 1940 s, Ball appeared in over 60 films. She was under contract to the Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) studio for seven years, playing leading roles in a number of low-budget movies. Often typecast as the plucky sidekick, her talent was largely wasted in these films. Some of her more notable films included Stage Door (1937), with Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers; The Affairs of Annabel (1938); Five Came Back (1939); Dance, Girl, Dance (1940); The Big Street (1942); The Dark Corner (1946); and Sorrowful Jones (1949), co-starring Bob Hope.
From 1947 to 1951, Ball played a wacky wife of a straight-laced banker on the popular CBS radio program, My Favorite Husband, which "I Love Lucy" was later based on. When CBS approached her about taking the show to television, Ball set a condition: she would only participate if her real-life husband, the Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz, played her TV husband. Ball and Arnaz had eloped in 1940, after meeting on the set of RKOs "Too Many Girls", but after over a decade, their incompatible work schedules had Ball staying in Hollywood making movies while Arnaz toured with his band and it had taken a toll on the marriage. Their solution: start working together, on a TV comedy based around the unlikely marriage of a redheaded housewife and a Cuban bandleader. While CBS executives were initially skeptical about public acceptance of such a couple, Arnaz and Ball won them over after they went on a successful nationwide tour with their vaudeville act, including a medley number called "Cuban Pete-Sally Sweet", and a popular myth has been around since then saying that they put up their own money to film a pilot of the show... this was untrue, as CBS has always been the backer for the show. (Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to get the book "Desi Lu" and read it! ) When "I Love Lucy" premiered on October 15, 1951, it immediately became one of the most popular shows on television.
In its six-year run, the show never ranked lower than third in the Nielsen ratings; it was No. 1 for four of those years and won more than 200 awards, including five Emmys. While all four principal characters, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo (Ball and Arnaz) and their neighbors, Fred and Ethel Mertz (William Frawley and Vivian Vance) became beloved fixtures in tens of millions of homes, it was Ball who won over the world with her tempestuous, disaster-prone Lucy. Perfecting her own brand of physical comedy, she represented a new kind of female character, goofy yet sexy, that TV had never seen the likes of before. The continued appearance of the very-pregnant Ball raised more than one traditional eyebrow, especially after the ground-breaking episode on January 19, 1953, when a then-record 44 million viewers tuned in as Lucy Ricardo gave birth to Little Ricky on air, the same night that Ball gave birth to her and Arnaz's second child, Desi Jr. (The President's Inaguaration took place on the same night, but only got around 20 million viewers. ) Apart from its content, the show also changed forever the way TV comedies were made, paving the way as the 30 -minute situation comedy increasingly replaced the once-dominant hour-long comedy variety show.
By 1957, after 179 episodes, both Ball and Arnaz had grown exhausted by the shows hectic taping schedule, and their always-tumultuous marriage was again in trouble. For the next three years, they made a series of hour-long specials, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, and Arnaz continued to work crazily on Desilu, which grew into a powerful corporation and spawned a number of hit TV series, including Star Trek and Mission Impossible. In 1960, Americas best-loved couple ended their 20 -year marriage. The volatile Arnaz declined into alcoholism, and in 1962, Ball bought his half of Desilu, taking out a bank loan of $ 3 million, and became sole owner of what was then the worlds largest production facility. Two years after her divorce, Ball brought the character of Lucy back, on The Lucy Show, which ran from 1962 to 1968, and Heres Lucy, from 1968 to 1974. Both shows featured her children, Lucie and Desi Jr. , as well as Vance and a new male co-star, Gale Gordon.
In addition to her acting career, Ball proved to be quite a success as a businesswoman. Lucy ws nominated for 13 Emmys and won four. In 1984, she was given the Kennedy Center Honors, the country's highest honor for acting. But these awards cannot compare to the hearts she won - of millions. On April 26, 1989, a week after undergoing open-heart surgery, Ball suffered a ruptured aorta and died at the age of 77. She was survived by Morton, her two children with Arnaz (who died in 1986 of cancer) and three grandchildren.
At the time of her death, I Love Lucy remained in syndication in more than 80 countries. A billboard was put up in her honor after her death that read "Heaven Needed A Laugh!" .
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