Lucille Ball was born on August 6,1911 in Jamestown, New York in the United States. Lucille Ball was one of two children of Henry Dunnell Ball, a telephone lineman, and Desiree (DeDe) Evelyn Hunt, a pianist who encouraged her daughter's acting ambition. When Henry Ball died in 1915,the family moved into DeDe's parents home, where "Grandpa Hunt", an Arden Socialist, became a father figure for Lucille and encouraged her acting ambitions by taking her to Vaudeville shows and films. Ball interrupted her high school education at the age of fifteen to enroll in an acting school in New York City, but returned home after six weeks with the school's advice that she give up her stage aspirations.
She continued to return to New York for casting calls and rehearsals, using the stage name Diane Belmont, while she supported herself with jobs as a drug store soda jerk, dress model, and nude model for artists and photographers. She contracted Rheumatoid Arthritis at the age of seventeen and was incapacitated nearly three years, but she returned to modeling after her recovery.
Ball eventually gained nation wide exposure in advertisements as the Chesterfield Girl in 1932.This led to movie roles with United Artists (she moved to California in the spring of 1933), first a brief walk on in Broadway thru a key hole in 1933,then as a Goldwyn Girl in Roman Scandals 1933 too. Ball spent eighteen months under contract with Goldwyn then joined the Columbia Pictures stock company, where she gained her first screen credit in Carnival (1935) and appeared in several comedies with the Three Stooges.
She then went to RKO studios, where she had her first speaking role, in I Dream Too Much (1935) and over the course of the next seven years her weekly Salary went from $50 to $ 3,500.During the following decade she appeared in dozens of times and eventually O obtained top billing in The Big Street (1942), Du Barry Was A Lady (1943), and The Dark Comes (1946).
