Actors - Lucille Ball

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Lucille Ball

	Actors - Lucille Ball

Lucille Désirée Ball (August 6,1911 – April 26, 1989) was an American actress, comedian and star of I Love Lucy. A 'B-grade' movie star of the 1930s and 1940s, she later achieved tremendous success as a television actress, and became one of the most popular stars in American history.

Biography

Early life and career

Ball was born on August 6, 1911, in the small town of Celoron, a suburb of Jamestown, New York to Henry Durrell Ball and Desiree "DeDe" Eve Hunt. Her family was Baptist; her father was related to George Washington and her mother was a mix of French, Irish and English descent. During her late teens she was fired from an ice cream shop because she kept forgetting to put bananas in banana splits. Her father was a telephone lineman for the Bell Company, while her mother was often described as a lively and energetic young woman.her father died when she was 4 so she became close to her grandfather. Her father's job required frequent transfers, and within three years after her birth, Lucille had moved from Jamestown to Anaconda, Montana, and then to Wyandotte, Michigan. While DeDe Ball was pregnant with her second child, Frederick, Henry Ball contracted typhoid fever and died in February 1915.

After her father died, Ball and her brother Fred were raised by her working mother and grandparents. Her grandfather, Fred Hunt, was an eccentric socialist who enjoyed the theater. He frequently took the family to vaudeville shows and encouraged young Lucy to take part in both her own and school plays. At the age of 15, Lucy dropped out of high school. In 1925, after a romance with a local bad boy (Johnny DeVito), Ball decided to enrol in the John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts with her mother's approval. There, the shy girl was outshone by another pupil — Bette Davis. Ball went home a few weeks later when drama coaches told her that she "had no future at all as a performer". Two years later, she witnessed the accidental shooting of a friend of her brother's, Warner Erikson, who found himself in the path of a .22 caliber rifle shot, severing his spinal cord. Her grandfather was sued and prosecuted, and lost the family home.

She moved back to New York City in 1930 to become an actress and had some success as a fashion model for designer Hattie Carnegie and as the Chesterfield girl. She began her performing career on Broadway using the stage name "Dianne Belmont" and was hired by theatre impresario Earl Carroll but then quickly fired from his Earl Carroll's Vanities.

She was let go again from the Shubert brothers production of Stepping Stones but did manage an uncredited walk-on role in 1933's Thru a Keyhole but then moved to Hollywood to appear in films. She appeared in many small movie roles in the 1930s as a contract player for RKO (including one movie with the Marx Brothers and another with the Three Stooges). She switched to MGM in the 1940s, but never achieved great success in films. She was known in many Hollywood circles as "Queen of the Bs" (a title previously held by Fay Wray) starring in a number of B-movies, such as 1939's Five Came Back
. Macdonald Carey was designated as her "King".

In 1940, Ball met Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz while filming the film version of the Rodgers and Hart stage hit Too Many Girls. The two hit it off immediately and eloped the same year, to much press attention. When Arnaz was drafted to the United States Army in 1942, he cheated on Ball. Arnaz ended up being classified for limited service due to a knee injury. As a result, Arnaz stayed in Los Angeles, organizing and performing USO shows for wounded GIs being brought back from the Pacific. Ball filed for a divorce in 1944. However, shortly after Ball obtained an interlocutory decree, she got together with Desi again.

In 1948, Lucille was cast as Liz Cugat (later "Cooper"), a wacky wife, in My Favorite Husband, a radio program for CBS. The program was successful, and CBS asked her to develop it for television. She agreed, but insisted on working with Arnaz. This show eventually became I Love Lucy. CBS was initially not impressed with the pilot episode produced by the couple's Desilu Productions company, so the couple toured the road in a vaudeville act with Lucille as the zany housewife wanting to get in Arnaz's show. The tour was a smash, and CBS put the show on their lineup.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Lucille Ball ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Lucille Ball; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Actors - Lucille Ball

Biography

Early life and career

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay