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Remembered as a dizzy sitcom redhead with show business aspirations, Lucille Ball was, in fact, a show business powerhouse and television pioneer. Throughout her teen years, Ball tried unsuccessfully to launch her show business career, finally landing a spot as a Ziegfeld Girl. She launched her Hollywood career as one of the Goldwyn Girls, but she moved out from the crowd of starlets to starring roles. With "I Love Lucy" (1951), she and husband Desi Arnaz pioneered the 3-camera technique now the standard in filming TV sitcoms, and the concept of syndicating TV programs. She was also the first woman to own her own film studio as the head of Desilu.
Lucille Désirée Ball
6 August 1911 - 26 April 1989
Jamestown, New York
Some of Lucy's nicknames:
Technicolor Tessie
Queen of the B movies (during the 1940s)
The First Lady of Television
The Queen of Comedy
Lucille Ball
I'd rather regret the things I have done than the things that I haven't.
Lucille Ball
It's been almost fifty years since "I Love Lucy" debuted on CBS on October 15, 1951:
- Lucille Ball had starred in a similar show on radio, "My Favorite Husband."
- CBS executives initially thought that Desi Arnaz, Lucy's *real life* spouse, wouldn't be believable as her husband on the show.
- "I Love Lucy" was the first major network program filmed before a live audience.
- Lucy was on the cover of the first issue of TV Guide.
During a Barbara Walter's interview, Jane Fonda claims that her father, Henry Fonda, was deeply in love with Lucille Ball and that the two were "very close" during the filming of Yours, Mine and Ours (1968).
During the 1933 filming of Roman Scandals (1933), young Lucille Ball, portraying a slave girl, needed to have her eyebrows entirely shaved off. They never grew back
Before her movie career, Lucille was a model at Hattie Carnegie's in New York. She mainly modeled heavy fur coats, because she was startlingly thin as a young lady.
Lucy was fired from working at an ice cream store because she kept forgetting to put bananas in banana splits.
Lucy and Desi Arnaz began "I Love Lucy" (1951) in the hopes of saving their crumbling marriage.
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Lucy put her Chesterfield cigarettes in a Phillip Morris package to please her sponsor (of the "I Love Lucy" (1951) show).
False eyelashes were invented by the American film director D.W. Griffith while he was making his 1916 epic, "Intolerance". Griffith wanted actress Seena Owen to have lashes that brushed her cheeks, to make her eyes shine larger than life. A wigmaker wove human hair through fine gauze, which was then gummed to Owen's eyelids. "Intolerance" was critically acclaimed but flopped financially, leaving Griffith with huge debts that he might have been able to settle easily - had he only thought to patent the eyelashes.
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