Certainly my current favorite:


Lucille Ball
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In 1927, Ball dated a gangster's son by the name of Johnny DeVita. Because of this relationship, her mother decided to ship Ball off to the John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts in New York City.[17] There, Ball attended with fellow actress, Bette Davis. Ball went home a few weeks later when drama coaches told her that she "had no future at all as a performer".[18]

Ball was determined to prove her teachers wrong and returned to New York City in 1929. She landed work as a fashion model. Her career was thriving, when she became ill with rheumatoid arthritis and could not work for two years.[19] She moved back to New York City in 1932 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 "Diane Belmont" and was hired—but then quickly fired—by theatre impresario Earl Carroll from his Vanities and by Florenz Ziegfeld from a touring company of Rio Rita.[20]

She was let go again from the Shubert brothers production of Stepping Stones.[16] After an uncredited stint as one of the Goldwyn Girls in Roman Scandals (1933) she permanently moved to Hollywood to appear in films. She appeared in many small movie roles in the 1930s as a contract player for RKO Radio Pictures, including movies with the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges. She can also be seen as one of the featured models in the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film Roberta (1935), where she met her lifelong friend, Ginger Rogers.[21] She and Rogers played aspiring actresses in the hit film Stage Door (1937) co-starring Katharine Hepburn. Ball was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the 1940s, but she never achieved major stardom from her appearance in those films.[22]

She was known in many Hollywood circles as "Queen of the B's"—a title previously held by Fay Wray—starring in a number of B-movies, such as 1939's Five Came Back.[23] Like many budding starlets Ball picked up radio work to earn side income as well as gain exposure. In 1937 she appeared as a regular on the Phil Baker show. When that completed its run in 1938, Ball joined the cast of the Wonder Show starring future Wizard of Oz tin man Jack Haley.[24] It was on this show that she began her fifty year professional relationship with Gale Gordon who served as the show's announcer. The Wonder show only lasted one season with the final episode airing in April 7, 1939.[25]

In 1940, Ball met Cuban-born bandleader Desi Arnaz while filming the film version of the Rodgers and Hart stage hit Too Many Girls. Ball and Arnaz connected immediately and eloped the same year, garnering much press attention. Arnaz and Ball frequently argued, especially over his indiscretions with other women, but they always made up in the end.

Arnaz was drafted to the United States Army in 1942. He 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. That same year, Lucy appeared opposite Henry Fonda in The Big Street, an uneven film but a strong personal performance. In this film she plays a tough nightclub singer whose legs become paralyzed. Fonda plays a busboy who cares for her.

Ball filed for a divorce in 1944. Shortly after Ball obtained an interlocutory decree, however, she reconciled with Arnaz again.[26] Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were only six years apart in age but apparently believed that it was less socially acceptable for an older woman to marry a younger man, and hence split the difference in their ages, both claiming a 1914 birth date.[27]

I Love Lucy and Desilu

In 1948, Ball was cast as Liz Cugat (later "Cooper"), a wacky wife, in My Favorite Husband, a radio program for CBS Radio. The program was successful, and CBS asked her to develop it for television. She agreed, but insisted on working with Arnaz. CBS executives were reluctant, thinking the public would not accept an All-American redhead and a Cuban as a couple. 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 Lucy as the zany housewife wanting to get in Arnaz's show. The tour was a smash, and CBS put I Love Lucy on their lineup.[28] The I Love Lucy show was not only a star vehicle for Lucille Ball, but a way for her to try to salvage her marriage to Desi Arnaz, which had become badly strained, in part by the fact that each had a hectic performing schedule which often kept them apart.[29]

Along the way, she created a television dynasty and reached several "firsts". Ball was the first woman in television to be head of a production company: Desilu, the company that she and Arnaz formed. After buying out her by-then ex-husband's share of the studio, Ball functioned as a very active studio head.[30] Desilu and I Love Lucy pioneered a number of methods still in use in television production today.[31] During this time Ball taught a thirty-two week comedy workshop at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute. Ball is quoted as saying, "You cannot teach someone comedy, either they have it or they don't."[32]

When the show premiered, most shows were aired live from New York City studios to Eastern and Central Time Zone audiences, and captured by kinescope for broadcast later to the West Coast. The kinescope picture was inferior to film, and as a result the West Coast broadcasts were inferior to those seen elsewhere in the country. Ball and Arnaz wanted to remain in their Los Angeles home, but the time zone logistics made that broadcast norm impossible. Prime time in L.A. was too late at night on the East Coast to air a major network series, meaning the majority of the TV audience would be seeing not only the inferior picture of kinescopes but seeing them at least a day later.[33]

Sponsor Philip Morris did not want to show day-old kinescopes to the major markets on the East Coast, yet neither did they want to pay for the extra cost filming, processing and editing would require, pressuring Ball and Arnaz to relocate to New York City. Ball and Arnaz offered to take a pay cut to finance filming, on the condition that their company, Desilu, would retain the rights to that film once it was aired. CBS relinquished the show rights back to Desilu after initial broadcast, not realizing they were giving away a valuable and durable asset. Desilu made many millions of dollars on I Love Lucy rebroadcasts through syndication and became a textbook example of how a show can be profitable in second-run syndication. In television's infancy, the concept of the rerun hadn't yet formed, and many in the industry wondered who would want to see a program a second time.[34] In fact, while other celebrated shows of the period exist only in incomplete sets of kinescopes too degraded to show to subsequent generations of television viewers, I Love Lucy has virtually never gone out of syndication since it began, seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world over the past half century. The success of Ball and Arnaz's gamble was instrumental in drawing television production from New York to Hollywood for the next several decades.[35]

Desilu also hired legendary German cameraman Karl Freund as their director of photography. Freund had worked for F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, shot part of Metropolis (1927) and had directed a number of Hollywood films himself. Freund used a three-camera setup, which became the standard way of filming situation comedies.[36] Shooting long shots, medium shots, and close-ups on a comedy in front of a live audience demanded discipline, technique, and close choreography. Among other non-standard techniques used in filming the show, cans of paint (in shades ranging from white to medium gray) were kept on set to "paint out" inappropriate shadows and disguise lighting flaws.[37][38]

I Love Lucy dominated the weekly TV ratings in the United States for most of its run. In the scene where Lucy and Ricky are practicing the tango in the episode "Lucy Does The Tango", the longest recorded studio audience laugh in the history of the show was produced. It was so long, in fact, that the sound editor had to cut that particular part of the soundtrack in half.[39] The strenuous rehearsals and demands of Desilu studio kept the Arnazes too busy to comprehend the show's success. During the show's hiatus, they starred together in feature films: Vincente Minnelli's The Long, Long Trailer (1954) and Alexander Hall's Forever, Darling (1956).

Desilu produced several other popular shows, most notably Our Miss Brooks (starring Ball's 1937 Stage Door co-star Eve Arden), The Untouchables, Star Trek, and Mission: Impossible. Many other shows, particularly Sheldon Leonard-produced series like Make Room for Daddy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, and I Spy, were filmed at Desilu Studios and bear its logo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w...cille_Ball

..yeah...

Lucille Ball is awesome. Very smart and very funny lady.

I always thought she was a bit over the top. But then, I like the Three Stooges, so....

I love her.


Don't remember where but I saw a show about her life,
and the part I remember most from that program was that she learned 'comedy' from some silent slapstick comic,
or something, and became the lovable comedienne.
And another thing I remember from that program was that as much of a lovable funny lady,
she was a perfectionist and was a very smart woman,
which to me didn't seem like it would be part of her personality... the perfectionist part.

I thought this thread was about hokie.

ArielB said:

!!!!


Go to bed!

hokie said:

YOU go to bed!



I can't sleep

http://prince.org/msg/100/293212

Never saw the appeal of that show

I have this set though,,,and I L--V-E it!

I adore her up to a point then it crosses a line into annoying

I Lucy!!!

I like Lucy, but I love this woman:

GetAwayFromMe said:

Is this Carol Burnett?

Harlepolis said:

That's my girl AND she's from Texas.

SCNDLS said:

I like her too

But I absloutly can't recall a THING she made(movie-wise)

I'd love to get into her though lately, I've been hooked on this dame...



I must've been outta my mind for sleeping on Ms.Jane Fonda. Her father wasn't to be sniffed at at all.

Which brings us to the original post I kinda liked him in this movie...



Even though it wasn't really a GREAT showcase on his talent,,,like his movie Jezebel with Ms.Davis

Harlepolis said:

I loved Carol in Annie As for Lucy movies The Long, Long Trailer is funny and cute.