Lucille Ball missed I Love Lucy as much as viewers did when it went off the air
While many consider acting to simply be a job, there are some who take it more seriously. For some, it becomes their whole life.
Lucille Ball wasn't just an actress; with her own production company, she was also a businesswoman, aware of the acute details that went into the meticulous planning of a television series.
Ball had spent much of her adult life in the entertainment industry. She had met her husband Desi Arnaz on the set of the 1940 film, Too Many Girls. The couple even celebrated the birth of their first child while filming their series, I Love Lucy.
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"Television was the medium for me, the medium for anyone who wanted to be well known a lot faster than waiting a year and a half for a movie to come out," Ball said in an article for The Associated Press. "It was all new. Nobody knew anything about television. Nobody was there to say, 'No, don't do that, it's wrong!' We never knew what was wrong and what was right. We were all feeling our way."
Luckily, Ball trusted her feelings and was able to turn the character of Lucy Ricardo into a star.
But Ball was so attached to the character she had built from the ground up, that when it was time to leave her behind, she was heartbroken, even years after I Love Lucy had ended.
"Lucy, for me, is like a memory," Ball said in an interview with The Rolling Stone. At the time of the interview, Ball was seventy-one, and her I Love Lucy days were long behind her, but that didn't mean that she missed them any less. "I am nostalgic about Lucy...I miss her," said Ball. "I miss my arena. I miss getting up and going to work every day. I have my charities, and I'm getting my house in order, but it's not the same."
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