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TheWrap

Cate Blanchett, Who Won an Oscar for Portraying Katharine Hepburn, Reportedly Will Play the Most Famous TV Actress of Them All in a Biopic to Be Written By Aaron Sorkin

Sep 3, 2015  •  Post A Comment

It’s another redhead for Cate Blanchett. Will it be another Academy Award as well?

“Cate Blanchett is attached to star in an authorized biopic of Hollywood legend Lucille Ball that Aaron Sorkin is set to write for Escape Artists,” reports Jeff Sneider in a scoop for TheWrap.

Says the story, “The film will chronicle Ball’s 20-year marriage to Desi Arnaz, with whom she starred on the classic TV sitcom ‘I Love Lucy.’ Ball had two children with Arnaz before they divorced in 1960. She married Gary Morton the following year.

“Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr. will produce with Escape Artists, whose executive Jenna Block will oversee development of the project on behalf of the Sony-based company.”

Blanchett won an Academy Award for portraying Katharine Hepburn in “The Aviator.”

Clearly it’ll be some time before this movie will come out. Meanwhile, if you want to read a terrific book about Lucy and Desi, we highly recommend “Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz,” co-written by Coyne Steven Sanders and Tom Gilbert. Tom was for many years the executive editor of TVWeek.

Here’s a taste: In “Desilu” Sanders and Gilbert write about the first reviews of the show, back in 1951:

“‘The Hollywood Reporter’ praised, ‘The outstanding pertinent fact about “I Love Lucy” is the emergence, long suspected, of Lucille Ball as America’s number-one comedienne in her own right…She is a consummate artist, born for television. Half a step behind her comes husband, Desi Arnaz, the perfect foil for her screwball antics and possessing comic abilities of his own more than sufficient to make this a genuine comedy team rather than the one-woman tour-de-force it almost becomes…a comic triumph of the first order….’”

“Desilu” then notes that Lucille Ball herself was not so sure the show would be a long-running hit: “I expected to work for a year, maybe two. I said, ‘I’m having a baby, and I’d like to have it like home movies for the baby.’ That’s how long I expected it would last.”

Because it was one of the first shows on TV shot on film, “I Love Lucy” has remained on-the-air, somewhere, ever since it debuted on October, 15, 1951.

 DesiluBook

One Comment

  1. Very few programs from that era have had the staying impact of I Love Lucy. Unlike many of those shows, I Love Lucy hasn’t aged poorly and is still fun to watch.

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