Saturday, October 4, 2014

Before she was Lucy



Lucille Ball didn't always look like Lucy Ricardo.  In the decades before I Love Lucy, she went through a series of "looks": platinum blonde, natural brunette, with many different configurations of lips and eyebrows.  It wasn't until the Forties that she settled on the overdrawn lip line, arched eyebrows, false eyelashes, and the famously hennaed red hair which would, soon thereafter, become the indelible image of a television icon.  The way she looked as Lucy is so imprinted on us that, in photographs that don't display that formula, especially those from the earliest days of her career, she's almost unrecognizable.

In "costume" for Eddie Cantor's Roman Scandals, 1933.

And then, she is recognizably "Lucy" but, without the filter of the television lens, still not quite what we expect.





4 comments:

  1. Wow, I love this...thanks for sharing, we do love our Lucy! xoxo

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  2. Could I trouble you for info on pic number 2?

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    1. It was supposedly taken in 1931, when she would have been twenty-years-old. I'm very sorry, but I don't have any other information than that.

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    2. And I can't even verify that!

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