Before she was the zany red-headed sitcom star of the 1950s and 1960s, actress Lucille Ball appeared on the Broadway stage and on radio, but it took a while for Ball to get her Hollywood movie career off the ground. And almost as soon as it did, she transitioned to television. During the 1930s and 1940s, Lucille Ball was a struggling bit player looking for her big break in Hollywood. She was even known as the ‘Queen of the Bs’ for her many appearances in B-movies. We know how it ends … with a tremendously successful television career and as the first female movie studio owner in Hollywood … but let’s look back at Lucille Ball’s fledgling film career during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
A natural-born performer, Lucille Ball entered the world in 1911 in Jamestown, New York. She loved the stage, and her widowed mother enrolled her in many acting classes. She even enrolled in the prestigious John Murray Anderson School for Dramatic Arts in 1925 where she was classmates with Bette Davis. For Ball, however, it was not a positive experience. Her teachers told her she lacked the talent to make it in show business. That lit a fire under Ball. She left drama school but was determined to prove her former teachers wrong.
In New York City, Lucille Ball found work as a model, then landed a series of small roles and chorus girl parts in Broadway shows. When she moved to Hollywood, she signed on to be a contract player with RKO Radio Pictures. She appeared in small roles in Roman Scandals in 1933, The Three Stooges in Three Little Pigskins in 1934, Chatterbox in 1936, and Room Service in 1938. During this time, Ball also appeared as a showgirl in several Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie musicals. In 1935, she was cast as one of the models in the film Roberta and a flower shop girl in Top Hat. In 1936, she had a short, but significant role in Follow the Fleet, and she portrayed a struggling actress in the 1937 film, Stage Door, which starred Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn.
Lucille Ball was delighted to land the lead role in the 1940 musical film, Too Many Girls. It was on the set of this film that she met Desi Arnaz. The two fell in love and were soon married. Ball’s movie career was finally heading in the right direction in the 1940s. She starred opposite Henry Fonda in the 1942 film The Big Street. When her real-life best friend, Ann Sothern, was forced to turn down the lead role in the 1943 movie Du Barry Was a Lady, she suggested that Lucille Ball take the part. She also starred in Best Foot Forward in 1943, Lover Come Back in 1946, and Lured in 1947.
Like many Hollywood performers, Lucille Ball supplemented her movie roles with work in radio. Her 1948 radio comedy, My Favorite Husband, was such a success that CBS worked with Ball, her husband, Desi Arnaz, and the couple’s studio Desilu Productions, to develop the show into a television sitcom. And the rest, as they say, is history. Just as Ball was beginning to land starring roles in Hollywood films, she made the move to TV. It was in television that Lucille Ball found stardom, although she occasionally returned to the big screen, the stage, radio, and even vaudeville. For Ball, the Golden Age of Hollywood was her formative years that helped set the stage for her groundbreaking TV career.