Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz are perhaps one of the most famous couples in television history. Their romance continued off-screen as well. Their marriage was famously tumultuous, and no one knows that better than their daughter Lucie Arnaz.
Keep reading to know more about their daughter and how her life turned out over the years.
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were perhaps the most beloved couple on American television at one time. Their show I Love Lucy depicted them as the Ricardos, a middle-class couple that were the ideal nuclear family.
The show had six seasons and ran from 1951 to 1957. It followed Lucille as Lucy Ricardo, a housewife who always gets into hilarious situations. While the couple seemed perfect in their on-screen depiction, in real life, their relationship was quite volatile.
The former Broadway star and the Cuban bandleader met while filming Too Many Girls. Their whirlwind six-month romance led to an elopement and marriage in November 1940.
After over a decade of their marriage, the couple became parents to daughter Lucie Arnaz, born on July 17, 1951. Two years after that, on January 19, 1953, they became parents to their second child, their son Desi Arnaz Jr.
The two children joined their parents in the family business of acting. They starred alongside their mother in the spin-off shows for I Love Lucy. Then in May 1961, after nearly two decades together, the couple filed for divorce.
It took years for Lucie Arnaz to open up about the reality of her parents’ marriage and their subsequent divorce. She revealed in a 2018 interview how “They were fighting all the time when we were growing up. There was a lot of anger and screaming.”
She lamented at her childhood where she had to deal with so many issues, she said, “Their divorce was horrible. And then there was the alcoholism. I had preferred those things had never been there. We didn’t have any abuse, but we did go through some pretty hard stuff, and that’s why my parents didn’t stay together. “
Lucille felt the split even more than perhaps her husband because she felt she had shattered the perception the American public had of her. She remarried soon after to comedian Gary Morton.
In her early twenties in 1971, Lucie Arnaz tied the knot to “The Doctors” actor Philip Vandervort Menegaux. The marriage ended in divorce five years later
But the younger Arnaz’s second try at marriage was much more lasting. She met and married actor and writer Laurence Luckinbill. Now the couple has been together for over four decades.
On June 22, 2023, Lucie celebrated her 43rd wedding anniversary with Luckinbill. She took to Instagram to remember the day many decades ago that she was last single on an apple farm in the coastal city of Kingston, New York.
Their friends and family arrived at the venue in a “big yellow school bus.” She was wearing a “lovely cream crocheted gown” as her father walked her down the aisle. She continued in her post, “…[I] vowed to love Laurence Luckinbill till death us do part. 15,695 days, 5 kids, and three grandchildren later, I am proud to still say,’‘ I do.’”
The Murder, She Wrote actress is still very much in love with her husband. She dedicated a sweet post to him on his 88th birthday late last year in November 2022. She posted a picture of him and wrote how he was “kind, talented, adorable, wise, [and] sexy.”
Luckinbill had two children from a previous marriage; Nicholas Luckinbill and Benjamin Luckinbill. And him and Lucie had three more children together; two sons and a daughter.
Their first child together Simon Thomas Luckinbill was born in December 1980, Joseph Henry Luckinbill was born on New Year’s Eve 1982, and their daughter Katharine Desirée Luckinbill was born on January 11, 1985.
Lucie Arnaz and her husband live in Palm Springs, and their family lives nearby. These days the actress wears her hair in a short pixie cut and spends her time with her beloved grandchildren.
On Grandparents Day in 2019, Arnaz joked about hitting the “jackpot” when the couple welcomed their first two grandchildren just four weeks apart from one another. Since then, they have welcomed many more grandchildren to their brood.
Lucie has been a second-generation actor. She was only 11 years old when she starred alongside her mother in The Lucy Show at 11 opposite her mother, which they then followed up with Here’s Lucy.
She also played the main character in the television movie Who Is the Black Dahlia? and also led in the short-lived comedy The Lucie Arnaz Show in 1985 as psychologist Dr. Jane Lucas.
She has played other roles in guest starring parts in shows such as, Marcus Welby, M.D., Murder, She Wrote, Fantasy Island, Law & Order, and the reboot of Will & Grace.
She has also been credited as a producer in three stories related to her parents. Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie, I Love Lucy’s 50th Anniversary Special, and Being the Ricardos. She also produced the 2003 documentary The Desilu Story.
In June 2023 she revealed that she will be doing an encore of her cabaret act titled I Got The Job! Songs From My Musical Past, at 54 Below in New York City. She had performed the show before the pandemic to a sold-out crowd.
While Lucie is very public about her life, her little brother Desi Arnaz Jr. is quite private about his. When Lucille Ball was pregnant with Arnaz Jr, her pregnancy was written into the show. And as fate would have it, she gave birth to him the same day the episode aired in which her character gave birth to ‘Little Ricky.’
This Girl Was ‘Molested’ by Babysitter as a Child — Now This 90s Icon Lives Alone with 5 Dogs on Her Farm
“I hope you die!” she told her former babysitter.
Her first wedding took place on the beach.
She thinks her new look is “a little rebellious.”
Despite her humble birth on July 1, 1967, in Ladysmith, British Columbia, to a waitress and jack-of-all-trades, the brunette in the photo’s birth was reported in a newspaper. She was the first centennial baby.
She went on to have an extraordinary life sparked by another instance of being in the right place at the right time. However, she first had to survive a traumatic childhood of violence and abuse.
Her parents were 17 and 19 when they had her and still went out occasionally. Somewhere between the ages of four and eight, she had a female babysitter who molested her for around a year.
The babysitter “sexualized” the girl at a very young age, making her play inappropriate games. One day, the caretaker told her because she is a “bad girl,” Santa Claus would not visit her that year.
“I ran after her in tears, calling her a liar… and clumsily stabbed her with a candy-cane-striped pen in her chest,” she penned in her memoir. “‘I hope you die!’ I screamed through tears.”
The female predator died in a car accident following her graduation not long after. On hearing the news, the girl came to believe it was her doing, that she had some extraordinary power. She carried this with her for her “entire young life,” eventually confiding in her mom and dad.
Her parent’s volatile relationship would also cause her to act out. Once, when the couple was fighting, she tried to divert attention away from it by telling her younger brother to hide while she convinced the town that he was missing.
Her father would dole out cruel punishments. When she went against his wishes to have her kittens in the house, he placed them in a paper bag and drowned them in the ocean. “I felt like I died that night, too,” she remembers.
Between ages 12 and 14, she was sexually assaulted twice, and a boyfriend kicked her out of a moving car. She once stopped her father from assaulting her mom further by punching him.
The young brunette became known as “Blue Zone Girl” when she was spotted on a jumbotron at a football game, but she would soon be renowned worldwide by her real name, Pamela Anderson.
A beer company scouted her as a spokesmodel, leading to a Playboy shoot. A “Home Improvement” role brought her into the mainstream, but she became a superstar portraying CJ on “Baywatch.”
Her whirlwind romance with drummer Tommy Lee crescendoed into a wedding on the beach in Cancun, Mexico, in 1995, where she wore a white string bikini and he was in trunks. The couple had two children, Dylan Jagger and Brandon Thomas.
The footage they made during their honeymoon was stolen and sold as one of the first sex tapes of the internet era. The actress has never watched the tape but has felt its effects. She wrote how it “ruined lives,” starting with their relationship.
Lee was jailed for four months after he was found guilty of spousal abuse, and they divorced in 1998. She filed for full custody of the children in 2012, claiming that he was emotionally and physically abusive towards them.
Anderson has experienced a resurgence in her career. She has taken back the narrative surrounding her crafted by the media with a memoir, “Love, Pamela,” and participating in the companion Netflix documentary.
Returning to her coastal hometown of Ladysmith, Anderson found a “healing space” with its “crazy calmness.” With limited paparazzi on the island, she feels protected. She lives alone with her five dogs.
“I live a more romantic life now that I’m alone than I did in relationships,” Anderson said of the home she made in her grandparent’s old farmhouse.
The humanitarian runs through the waves on the beach adjoined to her property year-round. When not working, she keeps busy in the 15,000-square-foot vegetable and rose garden and has taken up pottery. “I’m very crafty. I didn’t realize,” she said.
In an interview with People in January 2023, she conceded that she would like to have someone to share her life but that it tended to be a case of her catering to her partner’s needs. After Lee, she wed Kid Rock and married Rick Salomon twice (one of which was annulled).
Her most recent marriage to Dan Hayhurst lasted only a few months and ended in 2021. The “V.I.P.” star has learned that she does not need a man to bring her roses:
“I’ve just planted a hundred rose bushes. I can get them any time I want — and they’re my favorite roses.”
She told Elle in August 2023 that the early morning hours were her favorite time. Anderson spends this time writing a newsletter, though she quipped she does this to distract herself from writing long, rambling emails to her sons.
Just as gardening and writing in the mornings replaced the party lifestyle she enjoyed at the height of her fame, so has her signature beauty look morphed into something else.
She was known for big blond hair, thin brows, and heavy eye makeup with tiny outfits that were, by her own account, “wild and uninhibited.” Anderson added:
“I don’t know if it was a defense mechanism or what. I just thought, ‘I’m going to have fun.’”
Over the past few years, she has been sporting a more stripped-down beauty look, sometimes looking like she is not wearing makeup. Following the death of her makeup artist, Alexis Vogel, she started taking a new approach. She explained:
“She was the best. And since then, I just felt, without Alexis, it’s just better for me not to wear makeup.”
The star might have turned her back on the signature look, but a new generation of people have rediscovered her Y2K style and #Pamcore trends frequently on TikTok.
The animal lover contends that her beauty update is “freeing, and fun, and a little rebellious too.” When she looks in the mirror, she feels “rooted for.” Pamela Anderson says she is in a good place.
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