Lucille Désirée Ball (August 6, 1911 – April 26, 1989) was an American comedienne, actress, model, and film and television executive. She appeared on stage, screen and radio, but is primarily known as one of the most popular and influential television stars of all time.
Along with her late brother Fred, Lucille spent most of her childhood in or near her native Jamestown, New York. She first became involved in show business by performing as a chorus girl in a Shriners show at age 12. After attending drama school she found work as a fashion model and actress in New York City. In the early 1930s she moved to Hollywood and began appearing in small movie roles. Eventually she moved up to starring in B-movies for RKO Pictures; so many of them, in fact, that she came to be known as the "Queen of the B's." Among her better-known films are Stage Door, Dance, Girl, Dance, and Five Came Back. She also worked in the theater and in radio.
In 1940 she met Cuban-born bandleader Desi Arnaz while filming Too Many Girls; the couple fell in love and soon eloped. 1948 saw her cast in a successful radio sitcom called My Favorite Husband, which CBS soon decided to develop for television. She insisted that Arnaz be cast as her husband on the show and, after a vaudeville tour to prove that the pairing could work, CBS agreed. I Love Lucy ensued. It was followed by several The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour specials and two more successful sitcoms (The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy), which extended her TV stardom virtually uninterrupted through 1974.
During this time she continued to appear occasionally in movies and on Broadway, co-founded Desilu Studios with Arnaz — which the couple would continue to run even after their 1960 divorce, until Ball purchased it outright two years later — and even took the time to mentor an up-and-coming young comedic actress named Carol Burnett, who soon went on to achieve success in her own right. Her starring role in the film version of the musical Mame was a notorious flop, however, while an attempt at a television comeback in the 1980s (Life with Lucy) failed.
Her children, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr., are actors and singers in their own right; both appeared alongside their mother as regulars on Heres Lucy.
At present, with the exception of Here's Lucy, CBS owns the rights to all series starring Ball, having acquired the rights to I Love Lucy (and by extension, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour) when it purchased Desilu's pre-1960 library in 1960, and inherited the rights to The Lucy Show and Life with Lucy from Paramount (who had inherited the former from Desilu, and the latter from Spelling Entertainment and its distribution arm, Worldvision Enterprises). Paramount has released the entirety of the CBS-owned series on DVD, while MPI Home Video has issued Here's Lucy and her subsequent specials.
Nicole Kidman portrays Lucille in the 2021 biopic film Being the Ricardos which is set at the time of I Love Lucy. Christine Ebersole plays a No Celebrities Were Harmed Expy of her in Licorice Pizza.
Lucille Ball filmography on TV Tropes:
- Three Little Pigskins (1934) as Blonde Girl
- Top Hat (1935) as Flower Shop Clerk (uncredited)
- The Whole Town's Talking (1935) as Bank Employee (uncredited)
- Roberta (1935) as Fashion Model (uncredited)
- Follow the Fleet (1936) as Kitty Collins
- Winterset (1936) as Girl
- Stage Door (1937) as Judith
- Having Wonderful Time (1938) as Miriam
- Five Came Back (1939) as Peggy Nolan
- Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) as Bubbles
- Ziegfeld Follies (1945) as Dancer
- Ellis in Freedomland (1952) as Leyna
- The Long, Long Trailer (1954) as Tacy Bolton-Collini
- Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968) as Helen Beardsley
- Mame (1974) as Mame Dennis
- Stone Pillow (1985) as Flo
- I Love Lucy (1951–57) as Lucy Ricardo
- The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (1957–60) as Lucy Ricardo
- The Lucy Show (1962–68) as Lucy Carmichael
- Life With Lucy (1986) as Lucy Barker
Lucille Ball and her works provide examples of:
- Benevolent Boss: As head of Desilu, while on set and in the office/boardroom she was tough as nails; off-set, she was said to have treated every one of her employees, no matter how small the job, like a member of the family.
- Better as Friends: Her marriage to Desi Arnaz was a turbulent one due to his infidelities and alcoholism, and the stress of jointly running their production company. After they divorced, their relationship reportedly improved dramatically, and Desi without fail always sent her lilacs, Lucille's favorite flowers, for her major life events, though they never remarried.
- The Cast Showoff: Any chance she would get to show off her extensive background as a dancer, she would take it. Within her many sitcoms she could be seen waltzing with Van Johnson, doing the Charleston with Ginger Rogers, tap-dancing with John Bubbles, modding with her son, and of course performing alongside Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance and William Frawley.
- Dye Hard: Although she was initially a brunette, Ball dyed her hair blonde while an in-house model in 1928. She began dyeing her hair red for her role in Du Barry Was a Lady, after a request from MGM, and it remained that way for the rest of her life.
- Funny Character, Boring Actor: While Lucy Ricardo was a kind and kooky woman, Lucille Ball was a consummate professional who could perform comedy brilliantly, but wasn't "funny" in real life.
- I Am Not Spock: In the second half of her life she never really broke away from the "Lucy" character she portrayed on I Love Lucy and her subsequent series, but there's considerable evidence this was at least partly self-inflicted. She generally avoided making appearances out of character during the run of I Love Lucy (her ad with Desi promoting the 1954 March of Dimes campaign
was a very rare exception) and, after she stopped appearing in regular series television with the end of Here's Lucy in 1974, studiously avoided making any other TV appearances unless she was playing "Lucy" again (as in the one-off special Lucy Meets the President and the short-lived misfire Life with Lucy). Throughout it all, the fact that the character "Lucy" and Lucille Ball had the same name certainly didn't help in separating the character and the actor. The one time she attempted to break away from the "Lucy" character was the 1985 TV movie Stone Pillow, where she played a homeless bag lady living on the streets of New York. She approached the producers of Cheers, a show she admired, with an eye for playing the mother of Diane Chambers, but backed out at the last minute because she felt audiences wouldn't accept her playing anyone other than "Lucy". Once Life with Lucy failed she seemed to realize that she wasn't bound to that character and was to play the lead in Wicked Stepmother after Bette Davis quit... only for her failing health to prevent it.- Oddly, when she was actually playing the "Lucy" character she was more willing to branch out, starring in Yours, Mine, and Ours in 1968 and Mame in 1974.
- Indifferent Beauty: She was a very lovely woman, but she didn't mind compromising her beauty and looking foolish if it was for a laugh. Portraying a homeless woman in "Stone Pillow" she was anything but pretty or naive.
- Written-In Infirmity: Ball's second pregnancy became a major in-universe plot point in I Love Lucy, in an influential move—pregnancy had been considered a taboo delicate subject to portray in media beforehand and was not often discussed.
