Lucille Ball
Though she was best known for playing characters who were funny and down-to-earth, it seems like Lucille Ball was just a wonderful performer. Ball was notoriously rude to anyone who didn’t share her celebrity status. Once on an airplane, she completely ignored a flight attendant, instead having her assistant say, “I’m sorry, Ms. Ball doesn’t speak to the help.”
While she had many adoring fans, Richard Burton was not one of them. From his diaries that are soon to be published, he wrote about Lucille Ball, “She is a monster of staggering charmlessness and monumental lack of humour…”
“She is a tired old woman and lives entirely on that weekly show which she has been doing and successfully doing for 19 years. Nineteen solid years of double-takes and pratfalls and desperate upstaging and cutting out other people’s laughs if she can, nervously watching the ‘ratings’ as she does so…”