Lucille Desiree Ball | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Born: 6 Aug 1911, Jamestown, NY |
Actress and Comedian |
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Lucille Désirée Ball (August 6, 1911 – April 26, 1989) was an iconic American actor, comedian and star of the landmark sitcom I Love Lucy, a four time Emmy Award winner (awarded 1953, 1956, 1967, 1968) and charter member of the Television Hall of Fame. A 'B-grade' movie star and "glamour girl" of the 1930s and 1940s, she later achieved tremendous success as a television actress. She received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1986. Ball, known as the "Queen of Comedy," was also responsible with her then-husband, Desi Arnaz, for the foundation of Desilu Studios, a pioneering studio in American television production in the 1950s and 60s. Her father died before she was four, and her mother worked several jobs, so she and her younger brother were raised by their grandparents. Always willing to take responsibility for her brother and young cousins, she was a restless teenager who yearned to "make some noise". She entered a dramatic school in New York, but while her classmate Bette Davis received all the raves, she was sent home; "too shy." She found some work modeling for Hattie Carnegie's and, in 1933, she was chosen to be a "Goldwyn Girl" and appear in the film Roman Scandals (1933). She was put under contract to RKO and several small roles, including one in Top Hat (1935), followed. Eventually, she received starring roles in B-pictures and, occasionally, a good role in an A-picture, like in Stage Door (1937) or The Big Street (1942). While filming Too Many Girls (1940), she met and fell madly in love with a young Cuban actor-musician named Desi Arnaz. Despite different personalities, lifestyles, religions and ages (he was six years younger), he fell hard, too, and after a passionate romance, they eloped and were married in November, 1940. Lucy soon switched to MGM, where she got better roles in films such as Du Barry Was a Lady (1943); Best Foot Forward (1943) and the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle Without Love (1945). In 1948, she took a starring role in the radio comedy "My Favorite Husband", in which she played the scatterbrained wife of a Midwestern banker. In 1950, CBS came knocking with the offer of turning it into a television series. After convincing the network brass to let Desi play her husband and to sign over the rights to and creative control over the series to them, work began on the most popular and universally beloved sitcom of all time. |
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