TRIBUTE TO LUCILLE BALL

Biography for Lucille BallBirth name Lucille Désirée Ball ------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------Nickname Technicolor Tessie Queen of the B movies (during the 1940s) The First Lady of Television Lucy The Queen of Comedy ------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------Height 5' 7½" (1.71 m) ------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------Mini biography 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.----------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------IMDb mini-biography by Ray Hamel ------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------Mini biography The woman who will always be remembered as the crazy, accident-prone, lovable Lucy Ricardo was born Lucille Desiree Ball in Jamestown, New York, on August 6, 1911. Her father died before she was four, and her mother worked several jobs, so she and her younger brother were raised by their grandparents. Always willing to take responsibility for her brother and young cousins, she was a restless teenager who yearned to "make some noise". She entered a dramatic school in New York, but while her classmate Bette Davis received all the raves, she was sent home; "too shy." She found some work modeling for Hattie Carnegie's, and in 1933 was chosen to be a Goldwyn Girl and appear in the film Roman Scandals (1933).She was put under contract to RKO and several small roles, including one in Top Hat (1935), followed. Eventually, she received starring roles in B-pictures, and occasionally a good role in an A-picture, like in Stage Door (1937) or The Big Street (1942). While filming Too Many Girls (1940), she met and fell madly in love with a young Cuban actor-musician named Desi Arnaz. Despite different personalities, lifestyles, religions, and ages (he was six years younger), he fell hard, too, and after a passionate romance, they eloped and were married in November, 1940. Lucy soon switched to MGM, where she got better roles in films such as Du Barry Was a Lady (1943), Best Foot Forward (1943), the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle Without Love (1945). In 1948, she took a starring role in the radio comedy "My Favorite Husband", in which she played the scatterbrained wife of a Midwestern banker. In 1950, CBS came knocking with the offer of turning it into a TV series. After convincing the network brass to let Desi play her husband and to sign over the rights to and creative control over the series to them, work began on the most popular and universally beloved sitcom of all time.Lucille was born on August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York to Desiree and Henry Ball. Lucille had felt the desire to become an actress from an early age. At fifteen, she quit high school and moved to New York City to enroll in the Robert Minton - John Murray Anderson School of Drama. Drama school did not work out for Lucille and after a brief time at the school, John Murray Anderson told Lucille she was wasting her time.For the next several years Lucille went back and forth between Jamestown and New York City working on and off as a model for dress designer Hatter Carnegie. Lucille got her first break when she signed on as one of the Goldwyn Girls for an Eddie Cantor musical called Roman Scandals. While the job offered her neither fame nor security, it did give her a ticket to Hollywood.Lucille went from Goldwyn Girl to contract player for Columbia and eventually to RKO, where she appeared in thirty-one movies between 1935 and 1942. While most of these were B movies, Lucille did work her way up from bit player to lead actress and eventually showed a strong talent for comedy. The highlights of her RKO career included Stage Door in which she costarred with Katherine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers, Room Service with the Marx Brothers, and Too Many Girls. During the filming of Too Many Girls she met and eventually married a young cuban entertainer named Desi Arnaz. By the end of her days at RKO she had sharpened her abilities and was pulling in a larger salary; unfortunately however her movies were not very successful and stardom eluded her.In 1942, RKO sold her contract to MGM where her first film was a Cole Porter musical called DuBarry Was A Lady. For the role Lucille's hair was dyed an intensely bright red, thus giving birth to the "Lucille Ball look." While Lucille's career plugged along at MGM her fame never lived up to her talent and soon the studio began to doubt that she could ever become a major star.After all but giving up on the movies, in 1948 Lucille turned to radio and finally had a hit. The show called My Favorite Husband starred Lucille as Liz Cooper, a ditzy wife with a habit of getting into scrapes. From radio it was but a short step to television, although at first Lucille was relunctant to enter the new medium. Part of Lucille's reason for moving to television was to try to save her marriage. Desi's incessant touring with his nightclub act and the drinking and the womanizing that went along with it had put an immense strain on their marriage. CBS was eager to do a series with Lucille based on My Favorite Husband, but wanted no part of her Cuban bandleader husband. Lucille on the other hand refused to do a series that did not include Desi. Lucille and Desi formed Desilu Productions to do the series and then pushed both CBS and the show's sponsor Phillip Morris into letting them do the show exactly the way they wanted. Both the network and the sponsor relunctantly went along with the persistant couple and were rewarded with the most popular show in television history.During Ball's tenure on this series, she made two feature films with Desi, The Long Long Trailer in 1954 and Forever Darling in 1956. Although I Love Lucy was still at the top of the ratings, Lucy and Desi decided to end the TV series in 1957 and devote their time to a series of one-hour specials featuring the same characters. The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour ran until 1960, when Ball and Arnaz divorced.In 1961, Ball married nightclub comedian Gary Morton, who later served as a producer for her projects. From 1962 until 1974, she worked steadily on television and starred in two consecutive series: The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy. It is interesting to note that all three of Ball's TV shows ran on CBS on Monday evenings at either 8:30 or 9:00, making her a 23-year owner of that time slot.Toward the end of her career, Ball starred in two final feature films: Yours, Mine and Ours in 1968 and the musical Mame in 1974. In 1985 she experimented with non-comedic material, playing a homeless woman in the dramatic TV movie Stone Pillow. But the following year she was back performing pratfalls with her steady co-star of the 1960s, Gale Gordon, in the short-lived sitcom Life With Lucy.Lucille Ball's humor was always clean, always physical and always empathetic. She was a tireless performer and perfectionist whom could work with a prop as simple as a paper bag for hours on end until she was able to get it to pop in just the right way. Later in her carreer, Lucille often exasperated guest stars, many of them entertainment legends in their own right, by pushing them around the set and scolding them for poor timing and inadequate delivery. She was known to tally up the number of laughs her fellow comedians "lost" by saying a line the wrong way.Lucille Ball lived to perform and in her performing she made millions of people laugh. Blessed with an expressive face, a distinctive voice and impeccable timing, Lucille was not afraid to look the fool, in fact she reveled in it. She would stuff her face full of chocolates, roll around in a vat of crushed grapes, blacken her teeth into a hideous grin and don any manner of absurd costume in order to surprise and delight her audience. This tireless entertainer made seventy-three movies, appeared in fifty one television specials and starred in four television series during her career that lasted more than fifty years.Lucille Ball's last television appearance was with Bob Hope, who was in many respects her male counterpart in show business. Together they presented a production number featuring rising young talent on the 1989 telecast of the Academy Awards. Ball died only weeks later of a ruptured aorta. She can still be seen however in all her glory simply by turning on the television