Lucille Ball
A disciplined perfectionist who turned physical comedy into an art form and proved a woman could run a Hollywood studio. She died on April 26, 1989, aged 77.
Personality
Ball was ambitious and exacting, far more deliberate than her scatterbrained screen character suggested. Little on I Love Lucy was ad-libbed; she spent hours rehearsing physical routines and facial expressions until they worked. She was also a shrewd risk-taker in business. She insisted on casting her husband, Desi Arnaz, when CBS doubted audiences would accept the pairing, and the couple took a pay cut to film in Hollywood in exchange for keeping ownership of the episodes. She valued long working relationships, including decades with Vivian Vance and a fifty-year partnership with Gale Gordon.
Under pressure
Ball met rejection early and often. Her drama-school instructors told her plainly she would not succeed, and she was hired and quickly fired from Broadway chorus lines before settling into years of B-movie parts that earned her the nickname 'Queen of the Bs'. When her film career stalled she moved to radio and then television rather than waiting. After her 1960 divorce from Arnaz she bought out his share of Desilu and ran the studio herself. Late setbacks hurt her: the 1986 sitcom Life with Lucy was cancelled less than two months into its run.
The arc
Born in Jamestown, New York, Ball lost her father when she was three and spent part of her childhood with strict step-grandparents. She worked as a model and chorus girl before moving to Hollywood in the 1930s as an RKO contract player. The radio comedy My Favorite Husband led CBS to ask for a television version, which became I Love Lucy (1951-1957). She followed it with The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy, ran Desilu until selling it to Gulf+Western in 1967, and made her last public appearance at the 1989 Academy Awards, a month before her death.
Legacy
I Love Lucy was the top-rated show in America for most of its run, and Desilu helped establish methods television still uses, including filming before a live studio audience with several cameras. As head of Desilu, Ball oversaw series such as Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. She won five Emmy Awards, received Kennedy Center Honors in 1986 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom after her death. Time later named her one of the most influential women of the twentieth century, and the American Comedy Awards were renamed 'the Lucy' in her honour.
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