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.