Nicole Kidman is Lucille Ball: who was the queen of sitcoms

Opposed by fans, who criticized the choice of the Australian actress because she was too different from the histrionic image of Lucille, Nicole was strongly defended by the director. Which dissuaded her from giving up on the film, because Being the Ricardos it’s not a test of the star’s plastic imitation, of the legendary sitcom sketches.

Nicole Kidman. (Amazon)

Being the Ricardos, the plot

The film tells a bad week of work that involves the sitcom I Love Lucy, and the star couple, which begins to creak. From the husband’s suspicion of infidelity to the different ones tensions with colleagues on set, starting from the accusation brought against the actress – in full McCarthyism – to have close links with the Communist Party.

Affiliation is caused by a ticked box in 1936, when Lucille was 24, just to please his beloved worker grandfather. Disinterest in politics, the actress is however drawn into that communist “witch hunt” unleashed in the United States which involved Hollywood stars, directors and screenwriters. Not only that, Desi and Lucy also have to face battles with the show’s main sponsor, Philip Morris, and with radio gossip journalist Walter Winchell.

Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. The two performers were nominated for the Golden Globes. (Amazon)

But, apart from the movie, who was the real one Lucille Ball out of the limelight, the multi-faceted artist that made its mark on the American television industry, but little known in Italy?

Lucille Désirée Ball and the first steps

Lucille, born in 1911, lives a childhood marked by the loss of his father and poverty. Study at John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts in New York with the pupil of the school Bette Davis (“All I learned in acting school was how to be scared,” he said in an interview). She begins as a model, then as a series B film actress, until the turning point.

When it becomes the brilliant protagonist of a seminal program for television entertainment, following its peak by 60 million Americans.

Lucille Ball (1911 – 1989) and Desi Arnaz (1917 – 1986), 1955. (Getty Images)

The meeting with Desi Arnaz takes place in 1940, during the filming of the theatrical show Too Many Girls; he is a fascinating musician and actor of Cuban origin. They fall madly in love and in the same year they get married. Two children are born, Lucie and Desi Jr, and after 19 years they divorce. Despite the deep affection that bound them, it had become impossible for Lucille to bear more extramarital affairs and her husband’s alcohol abuse.

Desi Arnaz, the love of a lifetime

An intimate and professional relationship, imperfect but unique. Anyone who has known Lucille has always maintained that Arnaz it was the only true love of his life. His soul mate.

Lucille and Desi Arnaz in 1950. (Getty Images)

After him she married the comedian in 1961 Gary Morton, remaining his wife until her sudden death from an aneurysm, at her Beverly Hills home, in 1989. A few days after her last public appearance at the Oscars.

Lucy and me, the mother of all sitcoms

Broadcast on CBS from 1951 to 1957, and then continued for another three years in the form of annual specials, I Love Lucy immediately became a cultural and audience phenomenon, a point of reference for a generation of TV shows. For the comic timing, the rhythms, the terrific writing and the novelty of the first situation comedy to use the live shooting technique, with three cameras.

A “Lucy and I” scene. (Getty Images)

Hilarious even to today’s audiences, the show has stood up to all the tests of time as essentially unrepeatable.

So much so that it was mentioned in films (Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman watching the famous episode of the harvest done with the feet), and in other sitcoms (the reboot of Will & Grace contains a special episode that reproduces other famous sketches).

A revolutionary sitcom

With his verve, talent and his unmistakable grimaces there Lucy of television is a presence bigger than life, that is, beyond the human. Inside the irregular housewife’s cage follows his dreams by fighting against power and rules. Except that trust almost always betrays her, and plunges her into situations tragicomic.

As producer of the show, she was also a pioneer of some revolutionary choices, for example that of showing a multi-ethnic wedding in the early evening, as well as a pregnant woman (i.e. Ball herself was expecting her second child) at a time when the baby bump had to be hidden.

As a perfectionist, left little room for improvisation, spending hours and hours trying out his facial expressions and sketches. A heritage that influences the entire US show, to the point of paving the way for stars like Robin Williams.

“A lot of the really beautiful girls didn’t want to do some of the things I did: wearing mud packs, screaming, running around and falling into puddles. I didn’t care, ”he said Ball.

The first woman to head a Studios

In 1950 he founded his own production company, the Desilu Productions, becoming the first woman to lead a major study that produced, among others, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mission: Impossible And Star Trek. After Lucy continues to grind hits, especially on TV, with other sitcoms, albeit derivative from the original product: Here’s Lucy, Life with Lucy. Heavy smoker, she dies of an aortic aneurysm.

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