Lucille Désirée Ball (August 6, 1911 – April 26, 1989) was an American actress, comedian, producer, and studio executive. She was recognized by Time in 2020 as one of the most influential women of the 20th century for her work in all four of these areas.[1] She was nominated for 13 Primetime Emmy Awards, winning 5,[2] and was the recipient of several other accolades, such as the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award and two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.[3][4] She earned many honors, including the Women in Film Crystal Award,[5] an induction into the Television Hall of Fame, a Kennedy Center Honor,[6] and the Governors Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
Ball's career began in 1929 when she landed work as a model. Shortly thereafter, she began her performing career on Broadway using the stage name Diane (or Dianne) Belmont. She later appeared in films in the 1930s and 1940s as a contract player for RKO Radio Pictures, being cast as a chorus girl or in similar roles, with lead roles in B-pictures and supporting roles in A-pictures. During this time, she met Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz, and they eloped in November 1940. In the 1950s, Ball ventured into television, where she and Arnaz created the sitcom I Love Lucy. She gave birth to their first child, Lucie, in 1951,[7] followed by Desi Arnaz Jr. in 1953.[8] They divorced in March 1960, and she married comedian Gary Morton in 1961.[9]
Ball produced[10] and starred in the Broadway musical Wildcat from 1960 to 1961. In 1962, she became the first woman to run a major television studio, Desilu Productions, which produced many popular television series, including Mission: Impossible and Star Trek.[11] After Wildcat, she reunited with I Love Lucy co-star Vivian Vance for The Lucy Show, which Vance left in 1965. The show continued, with Ball's longtime friend and series regular Gale Gordon, until 1968. Ball immediately began appearing in a new series, Here's Lucy, with Gordon, frequent show guest Mary Jane Croft, and Lucie and Desi Jr.; this program ran until 1974.
Ball did not retire from acting completely, and in 1985 she took on a dramatic role in the television film Stone Pillow. The next year she starred in Life with Lucy, which, unlike her other sitcoms, was not well-received; it was canceled after three months. She did not appear in film or television roles for the rest of her career and died in 1989 from an abdominal aortic aneurysm and arteriosclerotic heart disease at the age of 77. After her death, the American Comedy Awards were officially dubbed "The Lucy" after her.
Lucille Désirée Ball was born on Sunday, August 6, 1911, at 69 Stewart Avenue in Jamestown, New York,[12] the first child and only daughter of Henry Durrell "Had" Ball, a lineman for Bell Telephone, and Désirée Evelyn "DeDe" (née Hunt) Ball.[13] Her family belonged to the Baptist church. Her ancestors were mostly English, but a few were Scottish, French, and Irish.[14][15] Some were among the earliest settlers in the Thirteen Colonies, including Elder John Crandall of Westerly, Rhode Island, and Edmund Rice, an early emigrant from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.[16][17]
Her father's Bell Telephone career frequently required the family to move during Lucy's early childhood. The first was to Anaconda, Montana, and later to Trenton, New Jersey.[18] On February 28, 1915, while living in Wyandotte, Michigan, Lucy's father died of typhoid fever at age 27 when Lucy was only three.[19][20] At that time, DeDe was pregnant with her second child, Fred Ball (1915–2007). Lucille recalled little from the day her father died, except a bird getting trapped in the house, which caused her lifelong ornithophobia.[21]
Ball's mother returned to New York, where maternal grandparents helped raise Lucy and her brother Fred in Celoron, a summer resort village on Chautauqua Lake.[18] Their home was at 59 West 8th Street (later renamed to 59 Lucy Lane). Also living in the house were Ball's aunt and uncle, Lola and George Mandicos, and their daughter, Lucy's first cousin Cleo. Having grown up with Lucy, Cleo would later work as a producer on several of Lucy's radio and television programs, and Lucy also introduced Cleo to her second husband, the Los Angeles Times critic Cecil Smith.[22]
Ball loved Celoron Park, a popular amusement area at the time. Its boardwalk had a ramp to the lake that served as a children's slide, the Pier Ballroom, a roller-coaster, a bandstand, and a stage where vaudeville concerts and plays were presented.[23]
Four years after Henry Ball's death, DeDe married Edward Peterson. While they looked for work in another city, Peterson's parents cared for Lucy and Fred. Ball's step-grandparents were a puritanical Swedish couple who banished all mirrors from the house except one over the bathroom sink. When Lucy was caught admiring herself in it, she was severely chastised for being vain. She later said that this period of time affected her deeply, and it lasted seven or eight years.[24]
When Lucy was 12, her stepfather encouraged her to audition for his Shriners organization that needed entertainers for the chorus line of its next show.[25] While Ball was onstage, she realized performing was a great way to gain praise.[26] In 1927, her family was forced to move to a small apartment in Jamestown after their house and furnishings were sold to settle a legal judgment.[27]
In 1925, Ball, then only 14, started dating Johnny DeVita, a 21-year-old local hoodlum. Her mother was unhappy with the relationship, and hoped the romance, which she was unable to influence, would burn out. After about a year, her mother tried to separate them by exploiting Ball's desire to be in show business. Despite the family's meager finances, in 1926, she enrolled Ball in the John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts,[28] in New York City,[29][30] where Bette Davis was a fellow student. Ball later said about that time in her life, "All I learned in drama school was how to be frightened."[31] Ball's instructors felt she would not be successful in the entertainment business, and were unafraid to directly state this to her.
In the face of this harsh criticism, Ball was determined to prove her teachers wrong and returned to New York City in 1928. That same year, she began working for Hattie Carnegie as an in-house model. Carnegie ordered Ball to bleach her brown hair blond, and she complied. Of this time in her life, Ball said, "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."[32][33]
Her acting forays were stilled at an early stage when she became ill with rheumatic fever and was unable to work for two years.[34]
In 1932, she moved back to New York City to resume her pursuit of an acting career, where she supported herself by again working for Carnegie[35] and as the Chesterfield cigarette girl. Using the name Diane (sometimes spelled Dianne) Belmont, she started getting chorus work on Broadway,[36] but it did not last. Ball was hired — but then quickly fired — by theater impresario Earl Carroll from his Vanities, and by Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. from a touring company of Rio Rita.[21]
After an uncredited stint as a Goldwyn Girl in Roman Scandals (1933), starring Eddie Cantor and Gloria Stuart, Ball moved permanently to Hollywood to appear in films. She had many small movie roles in the 1930s as a contract player for RKO Radio Pictures, including a two-reel comedy short with The Three Stooges (Three Little Pigskins, 1934) and a movie with the Marx Brothers (Room Service, 1938). Her first credited role came in Chatterbox in 1936. She also appeared in several Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers RKO musicals: as one of the featured models in Roberta (1935), as the flower shop clerk in Top Hat (1935), and in a brief supporting role at the beginning of Follow the Fleet (1936).[37] Ball played a larger part as an aspiring actress alongside Ginger Rogers, who was a distant maternal cousin, and Katharine Hepburn[38] in the film Stage Door (1937).
In 1936, she landed the role she hoped would lead her to Broadway, in the Bartlett Cormack play Hey Diddle Diddle, a comedy set in a duplex apartment in Hollywood. The play premiered in Princeton, New Jersey, on January 21, 1937, with Ball playing the part of Julie Tucker, "one of three roommates coping with neurotic directors, confused executives, and grasping stars, who interfere with the girls' ability to get ahead".[39] The play received good reviews, but problems existed with star Conway Tearle, who was in poor health. Cormack wanted to replace him, but producer Anne Nichols said the fault lay with the character and insisted the part needed to be rewritten. Unable to agree on a solution, the play closed after one week in Washington, D.C., when Tearle became gravely ill.[40]
In 1940, Ball appeared as the lead in the musical Too Many Girls where she met and fell in love with Desi Arnaz, who played one of her character's four bodyguards in the movie. Ball signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the 1940s, but never achieved major stardom there.[41] She was known in Hollywood circles as "Queen of the B's (B-movies)"[42] — a title previously held by Fay Wray and later more closely associated with Ida Lupino and Marie Windsor — starring in a number of B-movies like Five Came Back (1939).
Like many budding actresses, Ball picked up radio work to supplement her income and gain exposure. In 1937, she appeared regularly on The Phil Baker Show. When its run ended in 1938, Ball joined the cast of The Wonder Show starring Jack Haley. There began her 50-year professional relationship with the show's announcer, Gale Gordon. The Wonder Show lasted one season, with the final episode airing on April 7, 1939.[43]
In 1942 Lucy starred opposite Henry Fonda in The Big Street.[44] MGM producer Arthur Freed purchased the Broadway hit musical play Du Barry Was a Lady (1943) especially for Ann Sothern, but when she turned down the part, that role went to Ball, Sothern's real-life best friend. In 1943, Ball portrayed herself in Best Foot Forward. In 1946, Ball starred in Lover Come Back and the film noir The Dark Corner. In 1947, she appeared in the murder mystery Lured as Sandra Carpenter, a taxi dancer in London.[38] In 1948, Ball was cast as Liz Cooper, a wacky wife in My Favorite Husband, a radio comedy for CBS Radio.[38] (At first, the character's name was Liz Cugat; this was changed because of confusion with real-life bandleader Xavier Cugat, who sued.[45])
My Favorite Husband was successful, and CBS asked her to develop it for television. She agreed, but insisted on working with her real-life husband, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz. CBS executives were reluctant, thinking the public would not accept an Anglo-American redhead and a Cuban as a couple. CBS was initially unimpressed with the pilot episode, produced by the couple's Desilu Productions company. The pair went on the road with a vaudeville act, in which Lucy played the zany housewife, wanting to get into Arnaz's show. Given the great success of the tour, CBS put I Love Lucy into their lineup.[46]
I Love Lucy ran on CBS from October 15, 1951, to May 6, 1957, and was not only a star vehicle for Lucille Ball, but also a potential means for her to salvage her marriage to Arnaz. Their relationship had become badly strained, in part because of their hectic performing schedules, which often kept them apart, but mostly due to Desi's attraction to other women.[47]
For the production of I Love Lucy, Ball and Arnaz wanted to remain in their Los Angeles home, but prime time in Los Angeles was too late to air a major network series live on the East Coast; broadcasting live from California would have meant giving most of the TV audience an inferior kinescope picture, delayed by at least a day.[48] Sponsor Philip Morris pressured the couple into relocating, not wanting day-old kinescopes airing in major East Coast markets, nor did they want to pay the extra cost that filming, processing, and editing would require. Instead, the couple offered to take a pay cut to finance filming on better-quality 35 mm film, on the condition that Desilu would retain the rights of each episode once it aired. CBS agreed to relinquish the post-first-broadcast rights to Desilu, not realizing they were giving up a valuable and enduring asset. In 1957, CBS bought back the rights for $1,000,000 ($10.8 million in today's terms), financing Ball and Arnaz's down payment for the purchase of the former RKO Pictures studios, which they turned into Desilu Studios.[49]
I Love Lucy dominated U.S. ratings for most of its run. An attempt was made to adapt the show for radio[50] using the "Breaking the Lease" episode (in which the Ricardos and Mertzes argue, and the Ricardos threaten to move, but find themselves stuck in a firm lease) as the pilot. The resulting radio audition disc has survived, but never aired.
A scene in which Lucy and Ricky practice the tango, in the episode "Lucy Does The Tango", evoked the longest recorded studio audience laugh in the history of the show — so long that the sound editor had to cut that section of the soundtrack in half.[51] During the show's production breaks, Lucy and Desi starred together in two feature films: The Long, Long Trailer (1954) and Forever, Darling (1956). After I Love Lucy ended its run in 1957, the main cast continued to appear in occasional hour-long specials under the title The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour until 1960.[52]
Along the way, Ball created a television dynasty and achieved several firsts. She was the first woman to head a TV production company, Desilu, which she had formed with Arnaz. After their divorce in 1960, she bought out his share and became a very actively engaged studio head.[53] Desilu and I Love Lucy pioneered a number of methods still in use in TV production today, such as filming before a live studio audience with more than one camera, and distinct sets, adjacent to each other.[38] During this time, Ball taught a 32-week comedy workshop at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute. She was quoted as saying, "You cannot teach someone comedy; either they have it or they don't."[54]
Desilu produced several other popular shows, such as The Unto