Desi Arnaz (March 2, 1917 – December 2, 1986) was a Cuban-born American musician, actor and television producer. While he gained international renown for leading a Latin music band, the Desi Arnaz Orchestra, he is best known for his role as Ricky Ricardo on the American TV series I Love Lucy, starring with Lucille Ball, to whom he was married at the time. He is generally credited as the inventor of the rerun.
Desi Arnaz was born Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III in Santiago de Cuba to Desiderio Alberto Arnaz II (March 8, 1894 - May 31, 1973) and his wife Dolores de Acha (April 2, 1896 - October 24, 1988). His father was Santiago's youngest mayor and also served in the Cuban House of Representatives. His maternal grandfather was Alberto de Acha, one of the three founders of Bacardi Rum. According to Arnaz himself, in his autobiography A Book (1976), the family owned three ranches, a palatial home, and a vacation mansion on a private island in Santiago Bay, Cuba. Following the 1933 Cuban Revolution, led by Fulgencio Batista, which overthrew President Gerardo Machado, Alberto Arnaz was jailed and all of his property was confiscated. He was released after six months when U.S. officials, who believed him to be neutral, intervened on his behalf. The family then fled to Miami, Florida, where Desi attended St. Patrick Catholic High School. In the summer of 1934 he attended Saint Leo Prep (near Tampa) to help improve his English.
Lucille Désirée Ball (August 6, 1911 - April 26, 1989) was an American comedienne, film, television, stage and radio actress, model, film and television executive, and star of the sitcoms I Love Lucy, The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, Here's Lucy and Life With Lucy. One of the most popular and influential stars in the United States during her lifetime, with one of Hollywood's longest careers, especially on television, Ball began acting in the 1930s, becoming both a radio actress and B-movie star in the 1940s, and then a television star during the 1950s. She was still making films in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1962, Ball became the first woman to run a major television studio, Desilu, which produced many successful and popular television series.
Ball was nominated for an Emmy Award thirteen times, and won four times. In 1977 Ball was among the first recipients of the Women in Film Crystal Award. She was the recipient of the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1979, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kennedy Center Honors in 1986 and the Governors Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in 1989.
James Francis "Jimmy" Durante (February 10, 1893 – January 29, 1980) was an American singer, pianist, comedian and actor. His distinctive clipped gravelly speech, comic language butchery, jazz-influenced songs, and large nose helped make him one of America's most familiar and popular personalities of the 1920s through the 1970s. His jokes about his nose included referring to it as a "Schnozzola", and the word became his nickname.
Durante was born on the Lower East Side of New York City. He was the youngest of four children born to Bartolomeo Durante and his mail-order bride Rosa, both of whom were immigrants from Salerno, Italy. Bartolomeo was a barber, and his wife Rosa was the sister of a woman who lived in the same boarding house. Jimmy Durante served as an altar boy at Saint Malachy's Roman Catholic Church, known as the Actor's Chapel.
Durante dropped out of school in eighth grade to become a full-time ragtime pianist. He first played with his cousin, whose name was also "Jimmy Durante." It was a family act, but he was too professional for his cousin. He continued working the city's piano bar circuit and earned the nickname "Ragtime Jimmy," before he joined one of the first recognizable jazz bands in New York, the Original New Orleans Jazz Band. Durante was the only member not from New Orleans. His routine of breaking into a song to deliver a joke, with band or orchestra chord punctuation after each line, became a Durante trademark. In 1920, the group was renamed Jimmy Durante's Jazz Band.
Desi Arnaz, Jr. (born Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV; January 19, 1953), is an American actor and musician and the son of entertainers Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
Desi Arnaz, Jr., was born in Los Angeles, California, on January 19, 1953. He has an older sister, Lucie Désirée Arnaz, born in 1951.
His birth was one of the most publicized in television history. His parents were the stars of the American television situation comedy I Love Lucy, and Ball's pregnancy was part of the storyline, considered daring in those times. The same day Lucy gave birth to Desi Jr., the fictional Lucy Ricardo gave birth to "Little Ricky". Little Ricky as a baby was played by two sets of twins, Richard and Ronald Lee Simmons (1953–1954), followed by Joseph and Michael Mayer (1954–1955). A boy named Keith Thibodeaux (using the stage name Richard Keith) was later cast to play 6-year-old Little Ricky. As a testament to how interested the American public was in Lucy's TV baby, Desi Arnaz Jr. appeared on the cover on the very first issue of TV Guide with a title that read: "Lucy's $50,000,000 baby."
William "Bill" Boggs III (born July 11, 1946) is an Emmy Award–winning American television presenter and journalist.
Boggs was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently the celebrity correspondent for the syndicated My Generation television show airing on PBS, featuring interviews inspired by his 2007 HarperCollins book, Got What it Takes?: Successful People Reveal How They Made It to the Top. The book includes interviews with Renée Zellweger, Donald Trump, Sir Richard Branson, Clive Davis, Joe Torre, and others. He has also published a novel, At First Sight, with Grosett and Dunlap publishers.[citation needed]
A former news anchorman for WNBC in New York, Boggs also presented several game shows for CBS. He created the first national restaurant review show, TV Diners, for the Food Network, and spent many years hosting the network's first non-cooking show, the celebrity interview show, Bill Boggs' Corner Table. Boggs co-executive produced and hosted TV's first syndicated stand up comedy series, Comedy Tonight in the late 1980s.[citation needed]
Plot
After her parents are financially ruined in a lawsuit over a shooting accident, Lucille 'Lucy' Ball pursues her dream of fame as actress. She succeeds in comical parts, often the girl who gets the cake in her face. Then she meets and soon marries the love of her life, Desiderio 'Desi' . Ricky, Latin band leader and aristocratic son of an exiled Cuban mayor. Desi proves a business genius, who gets a revolutionary method adopted to gain production control of the sitcom "I Love Lucy", a format devised for him and Lucy to star in. Despite offspring, their family life soon gets into stormy waters, mainly due to his infidelity, gambling and temper.
Keywords: abuse, character-name-in-title, dancing, face-slap, gambling, hugging, infidelity, jealousy, love, play-within-a-play
When the comedy stopped...real life began.
Desi Arnaz: I work hard, I play hard, I drink hard and I love hard.
[on Desi's infidelity]::Lucy: That's your excuse? Because your daddy did it long ago on some Spic island?
Could they learn to love each other as much as the world loved them?
Before the Fans, the Fame, the Fortune...