Lucille Desiree Ball
Lucille Desiree Ball
Television comedienne, actress, producer...these words all describe her. Lucille Desiree Ball was born on August 6, 1911, in the small town of Celeron, just outside of Jamestown, New York. At age 15, Ball enrolled in the John Murray Anderson Drama School in New York City. However, after only twelve months of going there (with Bette Davis as a classmate) the acting coach informed Lucy that she was not talented and should go into a different field, because she'd never make it in acting! She then was a soda fountain clerk at Walgreens Drug Store and also sold hotdogs at the Celeron amusement park. There, she liked to act up for the customers and be silly, but her boss didn't appreciate her antics. She repeatedly auditioned, unsuccessfully, for Broadway chorus lines before turning to modeling. Using the name Diane Belmont, Ball became a model in fashion designer Hattie Carnegie’s studio and won national exposure as the Chesterfield Cigarette Girl in 1933.
A bad thing happened to Lucy's family in 1927, when Lucy was 16. They were having a birthday party for her brother, Fred, and Lucy's Grandpa Hunt allowed a girl who had never used a gun before to fire one. When she did, she accidentally hit a neighborhood boy, who ended up paralyzed below the neck. The boy died five years later. They went to court, but the judge in the case ruled the shooting an accident, but still ordered the Ball family to pay all the medical bills. They had to sell their home. From then on, Lucy remained terrified of guns.
From the early 1930s through the late 1940s, Ball appeared in over 60 films. She was under contract to the Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) studio for seven years, playing leading roles in a number of low-budget movies. Often typecast as the plucky sidekick, her talent was largely wasted in these films. Some of her more notable films included Stage Door (1937), with Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers; The Affairs of Annabel (1938); Five Came Back (1939); Dance, Girl, Dance (1940); The Big Street (1942); The Dark Corner (1946); and Sorrowful Jones (1949), co-starring Bob Hope. From 1947 to 1951, Ball played a wacky wife of a straight-laced banker on the popular CBS radio program, My Favorite Husband, which "I Love Lucy" was later based on.
When CBS approached her about...