Lucille Ball

Lucille Ball Lever Brothers / [Public Domain] via Wikimedia

Lucille Ball was born on August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York. Her family moved many times due to her father, Henry Ball, being transferred to different cities for his job at the Bell Telephone Company. Her father died of typhoid fever when she was only three years old. The only thing she remembered from that day was a bird getting trapped in their house. She has been afraid of them since then. After her father's death her mother moved their family to Celoron, New York to live with Lucy's grandparents. When her mother remarried, Lucy's new stepfather turned out to be in show business. He encouraged her to try out for a part in a chorus line. This was when she realized how much she loved performing and the recognition she recieved from it. Her family went bankrupt after her grandfather lost a lawsuit claiming that he was supervising a group of children who were playing with a gun that resulted in the accidental death of a neighborhood boy, and moved back to Jamestown. She later moved to Hollywood in order to fully pursue a career in acting.

Lucille Ball Pierre Tourigny (CC BY 2.0) via Flickr

Lucy starred in a variety of B-list films that earned her the title "Queen of the B's". She was also in movies with the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers, but none of these roles helped her achieve stardom. In 1940, she met Desi Arnaz, and they eloped. In 1944, she filed for divorce. The couple reconciled, but there was a strain on their relationship that would never mend. In 1948, Lucy landed a starring role in a comedy radio program called My Favorite Husband on CBS Radio. CBS liked the program so much that they asked Lucy to develop it into a television series. Lucy agreed, but on the condition that Desi Arnaz played her husband. CBS was not impressed by the pilot episode, so Lucy and Desi went on a theatrical tour and made the country fall in love with the story. The show, called I Love Lucy, was about a newlywed couple, Ricky and Lucy, and their wacky hijinks as Lucy tried to become famous in her husband's bandstand show. Not only was the show a way to showcase Lucy, but it was also a way to salvage her failing marriage. When the show premiered, Lucy and Desi had to find a new way to broadcast it. Previously, all shows had been filmed on kinescope and aired later on depending on when primetime was in different time zones. They decided to use film to record their show. The studio, however, said that the process of filming and editing would be expensive and slow. But Lucy and Desi were adamant, and said they would take a pay cut if they got to keep the rights to the film. This turned out to be a wise decision, as it made them millions of dollars.

In 1953, the federal government attacked Lucy for being a registered voter for the Communist party. She had signed a certificate saying that she was a Communist at the insistence of her socialist grandfather. Before the taping of one of the later episodes of I Love Lucy, Desi Arnaz remarked,"The only thing red about Lucy is her hair, and even that is not legitimate." When she came on stage, she recieved a standing ovation. In July 1951, Lucy finally had her first child after several miscarriages, Lucie Arnaz. A year later, her second child, Desi Arnaz, Jr. was born. I Love Lucy was so popular at the time that Lucy and Desi decided to write the pregnancy into the show. However, due to the standards of the time, the word "pregnant" was not allowed to be spoken on television, so they used "expecting" instead. Due to a number of factors, including stress and alcoholism, the couple divorced but remained friends. She later went on to star in several less popular shows until her death in 1989.

Lucille Ball was a woman who loved to act and make people laugh. She was the first woman to own and head a production company, Desilu, which went on to produce famous shows such as Star Trek, The Andy Griffith Show, and The Dick Van Dyke Show. She also pioneered many techniques for filming situational comedies, like using a live studio audience, multiple cameras, and flat lighting. She made television into what it is today.