Lucille Ball was one of television’s foremost pioneers and a preeminent woman in the history of television. As a young contract player for MGM, Ball began her career as a Goldwyn Girl, eventually moving up to become a moderately respected star of “B” movies. She came to television after nearly 20 years in motion pictures, having undergone a gradual transformation from a platinum blonde sex symbol to a wise-cracking redhead.

Her first television program, I Love Lucy, premiered October 15, 1951, and for the next 25 years Lucille Ball virtually ruled the airwaves in a series of situation comedies designed to exploit her elastic expressions, slapstick abilities, and distinct verbal talents. A five-time Emmy Award winner, the first woman inducted into the Television Academy’s Hall of Fame, recipient of a Genii Award and a Kennedy Center Honor, Lucille Ball was perhaps the most beloved of all television stars, and certainly the most recognizable.

In all of her television series, the protagonist she played was at once beautiful, zany, inept, and talented. Her comedic skills were grounded in the style of the silent comics, and Buster Keaton, with whom she once shared an office at MGM, seems to have been particularly influential in the development of Ball’s daring exploits, hang-dog expressions, and direct looks at the audience. Although she personally fueled the myth that much of her performance was ad-libbed, in actuality, every move was choreographed. An accomplished perfectionist, she spent days practicing a particular routine before incorporating it into her programs. So distinct were her rubbery facial expressions that scriptwriters for I Love Lucy referred to them with specific code word notations. For example, the cue “puddling up” directed the star to pause momentarily with huge tear-filled eyes and then burst into a loud wail. “Light bulb” was an indication to portray a sudden idea, while “credentials” directed the star to gape in astonished indignation. Her importance for future comedians such as Mary Tyler Moore, Candice Bergen, and Cybill Shepard was paramount; Ball demonstrated that a woman could be beautiful and silly, and that she could perform the most outrageous of slapstick routines and still be feminine. Ball’s unusual use of props and her imaginative escapes from the most implausible of situations influenced future sitcom stars such as Penny Marshall, Bronson Pinchot, Ellen Degeneres, and Robin Williams, whose comedic styles and series’ storylines echoed her own.

But while her acting contributions are singularly laudable, it was Ball’s role in redefining the very structure of television programming that makes her noteworthy. Her independence, popularity, and determination, coupled with her husband’s technical and financial savvy, resulted in their co-ownership and control of one of the most successful television production studios in history.

I Love Lucy was one of the first television series to be produced live on film, using a multiple-camera technique in front of a studio audience. The filmed nature of the program granted it a permanency that allowed Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, to profit from reruns, syndication, and foreign distribution. The program was incomparably successful, reaching the number one position by February of its first season and remaining number one for four of its six years on the air, averaging a 67 share. Aired in more than 100 countries, the series quite literally financed the creation of Desilu Studios, where Ball and her husband reigned as vice president and president, respectively. Desilu went on to become the production headquarters for many of the greatest TV hits of the 1950s and 1960s, including Our Miss Brooks, Make Room for Daddy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Untouchables, Mission Impossible, Mannix, and Star Trek. Indeed, it was Ball’s clout with the CBS network that convinced its executives to pick up the latter three pilots.

Ball’s first success with I Love Lucy allowed her a power denied most entertainers. She was one of the few 1950s television stars to successfully fight the Communist witch-hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), when a 1953 Walter Winchell program attempted to derail her career. Established film stars, such as Orson Welles, William Holden, and Joan Crawford, who had previously shunned television, made guest appearances on Ball’s program for the sake of appearing with the queen of prime time. Ball’s popularity with the press and her fans forced CBS executives to acquiesce to her decision to reveal her real-life pregnancy during the show’s second season. This television first was monitored carefully by a trio of clergy who oversaw each script. While timid CBS executives insisted the word “expectant” be substituted for “pregnant,” seven episodes detailed the fictional Lucy’s pregnancy in near symmetry with the actress’s own physical condition. Backlogging five episodes for use while she convalesced from delivery, the program worked around Ball’s due date, so that her real-life Caesarean delivery coincided with the airing of her television delivery. The episode set a rating record of 71.1, with more viewers tuning in to witness the fictional Lucy Ricardo give birth than had seen Eisenhower’s inauguration.

With her 1962 buyout of Desilu from her by then ex-husband Desi Arnaz, Ball became the first woman to head a major television production studio. Through the mid-1970s she starred in three additional series for CBS, with her third series, The Lucy Show, earning the highest initial price ever paid for a 30-minute series ($2.3 million for 30 episodes). In the mid-1960s, she sold Desilu to Gulf and Western for $17 million, and she went on to form Lucille Ball Productions with her second husband, Gary Morton, as vice president. Her final CBS series, Here’s Lucy, while not as critically acclaimed as her previous ventures, was responsible for launching the careers of her children Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr., and for bringing Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton into situation comedy.

By the mid-1970s, diffused lighting, surgical tape “face lifts,” skilled makeup, and a bright wig could not hide her diminishing physical flexibility or her increasing reliance on cue cards. A 1986 ABC series, Life with Lucy, seemed forced and stodgy and lasted a mere 13 weeks. But even in her decline there were flashes of brilliance. In 1985 she surprised critics and fans with her appearance as a homeless woman in the CBS made-for-TV movie Stone Pillow. With her death in 1989, she was eulogized by fans, network executives, and even the president of the United States, as “the first woman of television.”

For all her impact upon the very nature of television production, Ball is most vividly recalled as a series of black-and-white images. To remember Lucille Ball is to recall a profusion of universal images of magical mayhem—a losing battle with a candy conveyor belt, a flaming nose, a slippery vat of grapes—images that, unlike most American situation comedy, transcend nationalities and generations, in an absolute paradigm of side-splitting laughter.