Lucille Ball

At 77 years old, Lucille Ball has this physical status:

Career

Ball, 1925, and then only 14, began dating Johnny DeVita, a 21-year-old local hoodlum. Her mother was dissatisfied with her child's marriage, and she wished that the affair, which she was unable to influence, would end. Her mother tried to distance them after about a year by exploiting Ball's insatisfaction with being in show business. Despite the family's meager funds, she enrolls Ball in the John Murray Anderson School of Dramatic Arts in New York City, where Bette Davis was a fellow student. "All I learned in drama school was how to be scared," Ball later said about that time in her life. Ball's teachers were concerned that she would not be profitable in the entertainment industry and were hesitant to mention it openly to her.

Ball continued to do her teachers wrong and returned to New York City in 1928 to face this scathing criticism. She first started working for Hattie Carnegie as an in-house model in the same year. Ball was asked by Carnegie to bleach her brown hair blond, and she obliged. "Hattie taught me how to slouch properly in a $1,000 hand-sewn sequin dress and how to wear a $40,000 sable coat as casually as rabbit," Ball said of this period in her life.

Her acting debuts began early in the 1990s when she was ill with rheumatic fever and was unable to work for two years.

She returned to New York City in 1932 to resurrect her acting career, where she supported herself by serving for Carnegie and as the Chesterfield cigarette girl. Diane (sometimes spelled Dianne) Belmont) began to perform on Broadway, but it wasn't long. Ball was recruited but quickly dismissed by theatre impresario Earl Carroll of his Vanities, and Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. of a touring company in Rio Rita.

Ball, who starred Eddie Cantor and Gloria Stuart in Roman Scandals (1933), has stayed in Hollywood to appear in films. She appeared in a few small films in the 1930s as a contract artist for RKO Radio Pictures, including a two-reel comedy short with The Three Stooges (Three Little Pigskins, 1934) and a Marx Brothers film (Room Service, 1938). In 1936, Chatterbox was her first acknowledged role. She appeared in many Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers RKO musicals (1935), as the flower shop clerk in Top Hat (1935), and in a brief supporting role at the start of Follow the Fleet (1936). Ball starred in the film Stage Door (1937), alongside Ginger Rogers, a distant maternal cousin, and Katharine Hepburn.

In 1936, she landed in the Bartlett Cormack's production Hey Diddle Diddle, a comedy set in a duplex apartment in Hollywood, and she hoped that it would bring her to Broadway. On January 21, 1937, the play premiered in Princeton, New Jersey, with Ball playing Julie Tucker, "one of three roommates struggling with neurotic directors, jumbled executives, and grasping actresses who hinder the girls' ability to move ahead." The performance received raves, but Conway Tearle, a celebrity in poor health, had a problem. Cormack wanted to replace him, but producer Anne Nichols said the error lay with the character and that the role must be rewritten. If unable to reach a compromise, the play was cancelled after a week in Washington, D.C., where Tearle was seriously ill.

Ball played the lead in the 1940 film Too Many Girls, where she met and fell in love with Desi Arnaz, one of her character's four bodyguards. Ball signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the 1940s, but there was no success in the city. She was known as "Queen of the Bs" in Hollywood circles, a title first held by Fay Wray and later more closely affiliated with Ida Lupino and Marie Windsor — appearing in a number of B-movies (1939).

Ball, like many young actresses, discovered radio work to supplement her income and increase visibility. She appeared on The Phil Baker Show on a regular basis in 1937. Ball appeared on the cast of The Wonder Show starring Jack Haley when it came to an end in 1938. Gale Gordon, the show's announcer, started her 50-year career with the show's announcer. The Wonder Show lasted one season, with the last episode airing on April 7, 1939.

Lucy in 1942 appeared in The Big Street opposite Henry Fonda. Arthur Freed, a MGM executive, purchased the Broadway hit musical play Du Barry Was a Lady (1943), primarily for Ann Sothern, but when she canceled the role, she became Miss Sothern's true-life best friend. Ball starred in Best Foot Forward in 1943. Ball appeared in Lover Come Back in 1946. Sandra Carpenter, a taxi dancer in London, appeared in the murder mystery Lured in 1947. In 1948, Ball was seen as Liz Cooper, a wacky wife in My Favorite Husband, a CBS Radio radio comedy. (At first, the character's name was Liz Cugat; this was changed due to rumors with real-life bandleader Xavier Cugat, who sued).

My Favorite Husband was a hit, and CBS ordered her to produce it for television. She accepted, but refused to work with her real-life husband, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz. CBS executives were reticent, fearing that the public would not accept both an Anglo-American redhead and a Cuban as a couple. The pilot episode, which was produced by the couple's Desilu Productions firm, had initially piqued interest in CBS. The pair performed in a vain deville act, in which Lucy played the zany housewife who wanted to get into Arnaz's show. Given the tour's huge success, CBS brought I Love Lucy to their line.

I Love Lucy was not only a star vehicle for Lucille Ball, but also a potential way for her to recover her marriage to Arnaz. Their marriage had become strained as a result of their packed working schedules, which often kept them apart, but more because of Desi's attraction to other women.

Ball invented a television dynasty and received several firsts along the way. She was the first woman to head Desilu, which she had formed with Arnaz. She bought out her stake and became a very involved studio leader after their divorce in 1960. Desilu and I Love Lucy pioneered a variety of techniques that are still in use in television production today, such as filming before a live studio audience with more than one camera and separate sets directly adjacent to each other. Ball held a 32-week comedy workshop at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute during this period. "You cannot teach someone comedy," she was quoted as saying, "You either have it or not."

During the run of I Love Lucy, Ball, and Arnaz, they wanted to stay in their Los Angeles home, but time-zone logistics made that impossible. Since prime time in Los Angeles was too late to air a major network series live on the East Coast, filming in California would have resulted in the TV audience's a poor kinescope snapshot, which was postponed by at least a day.

The couple were forced to relocate by sponsor Philip Morris, who did not want day-old kinescopes airing in major East Coast markets, nor did they want to pay the extra expense for filming, processing, and editing. Rather, the couple proposed a salary cut to finance filming, which Arnaz did on a higher-quality 35mm film and on the condition that Desilu retains the rights of each episode after it aired. CBS has decided to relinquish the rights to Desilu's post-first broadcasting, unaware that they were part of a long-serving and valuable asset. CBS bought back the right to $1,000,000 ($9.65 million in today's terms), paying Ball and Arnaz's down payment for the purchase of the former RKO Pictures studios, which then turned into Desilu Studios.

For the majority of its time, I Love Lucy led the US charts. Using the "Breaking the Lease" episode (in which the Riberos and Mertzes complain) and the Rigos threatening to move but find themselves stuck in a long-term contract) as the pilot, an attempt was made to adapt the show for radio. The resulting radio audition CD has survived, but not one has been broadcast.

In the episode "Lucy Does The Tango," Lucy and Ricky performed the tango, prompting the show's longest recorded studio audience chuckle, although the sound editor had to cut the soundtrack in half. Lucy and Desiree starred together in two feature films: The Long, Long Trailer (1954) and Forever, Darling (1956), during the show's development breaks. The main cast continued to appear in occasional hour-long specials under the title The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour until 1960.

Desilu also produced several other popular programs, including The Untouchables, Star Trek, and Mission: Impossible. Lucy sold her studio to Gulf+Western in 1967 for $17 million ($138 million in today's dollars), but it was rebranded Paraphrased

After several weeks of returned ticket sales, the 1960 Broadway musical Wildcat ended its run early, indicating that producer and actor Ball could not recover from a virus and continue the performance. The show was the source of her song "Hey, Look Me Over," which she performed with Paula Stewart on The Ed Sullivan Show. In 1964–65, Ball hosted Let's Talk to Lucy, a CBS Radio talk show. She also appeared on several more films, including Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968), Mame (1972), and two more successful long-running sitcoms for CBS including Gordon Gordon (1968–74), as well as Lucy Arnaz and Desi Arnaz, Jr., who recalled her family's history, why she married and how she learned to be content while married, including Gordon's real-life children. She also shared a tale about how she helped find an underground Japanese radio signal after mistakenly picking up the tone in her teeth.

Ball's close friends in the trade included perennial co-star and film actress Judy Garland, Ann Sothern, and Ginger Rogers, as well as comedic television actress Jack Benny, Barbara Pepper, Ethel Merman, Mary Wickes, and Mary Jane Croft; none other than Garland appeared on her various shows at least once. Keith Andes and Paula Stewart, co-stars on Broadway's later sitcoms, as did Joan Blondell, Rich Little, and Ann-Margret. As Eden appeared on an episode of I Love Lucy, Ball mentored actress and singer Carole Cook and befriended Barbara Eden. Ball was initially considered by Frank Sinatra for the role of Mrs. Iselin in the Cold War drama The Manchurian Candidate. John Frankenheimer, the film director and producer, had worked with Angela Lansbury in a mother role in All Fall Down and wanted to include her in the role.

Ball was the lead actor in a number of comedy television specials from 1980, including Lucy Calls the President, which starred Vivian Vance, Gale Gordon, and Mary Jane Croft, and Lucy Moves to NBC, a special depicting a fictionalization of her move to NBC's NBC television network. Ball, a 1959 acquaintance and mentor to Carol Burnett, became a mentor and mentor. Carol + 2 was a success on Burnett's highly awaited CBS-TV show, and the younger performer complied by appearing on The Lucy Show. Ball was reported to have given Burnett a chance to act on her own sitcom, but Burnett was turned down (and refused) Here's Agnes by CBS executives. Due to a clause that was not applicable to her current employment with CBS, she was compelled to produce her own variety show. Both women were close friends before Ball's death in 1989. On Burnett's birthday, Ball sent flowers every year.

She began working as an actress but later became an assistant professor at California State University, Northridge, in 1979.

Ball attempted to revive her television career in the 1980s. In 1982, she hosted a two-part Three's Company retrospective, featuring clips from the show's first five seasons, summarizing memorable plotlines, and reflecting on her love of the program.

Both Lucille Ball and Gary Morton had joined up in 1983 to create a film and television production house at 20th Century Fox, which includes all film and television productions, as well as plans to produce plays.

Stone Pillow, an elderly homeless woman, received mixed feedback in 1985, but it did have a large audience. Life with Lucy, her 1986 sitcom comeback, starring her longtime foil Gale Gordon, co-produced by Ball, Gary Morton, and prolific producer Aaron Spelling, was called off less than two months into its run by ABC. Ball was named the Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year in February 1988.

Ball was hospitalized in May 1988 after suffering from a mild heart attack. In which fellow host Bob Hope and she were honoured with a standing ovation, she made her last public appearance, just one month before her death.

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