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.

Lucille Ball - the glamour years

Starting out in Hollywood as a barely clad Goldwyn Girl in 1933, she worked her way up to wise-cracking bit parts, then wise-cracking second bananas, and by the late Thirties held the title of "Queen of the B's".  Her work in the Fifties would make her a legend, but by the time she'd signed with MGM in 1942, at the age of thirty-one, she had blossomed into one of classic Hollywood's great beauties.

Lover Come Back, 1946.

Easy to Wed, 1946.

Ziegfeld Follies, 1945.