Lucille Ball Kick-Started Her Acting Career With A Dramatic 1980s TV Movie
While Lucille Ball is etched into the side of Sitcom Mount Rushmore, by the mid-1980s, the TV comedy well had run dry. Check out her acting IMDb in the 1980s — it’s a complete blank for the first half of the decade. She’d been off TV since a bit in a Cher variety special in 1979. Sure, she had plenty of residuals to keep the lights on, but she “wanted to go back to work because I like to work," she told The Abbotsford News, as reported by MeTV.
“I had no idea what I wanted to do until I saw my first shopping bag lady in New York,” Ball confessed. “When I started passing her and not giving a second look, I got worried that something was wrong with me. The lady had become part of the scenery, and I wasn’t caring. So when CBS called and asked me if I was interested in working, I suggested a film about one of those poor ladies.”
Ball’s heart was in the right place. “Care for the homeless: That’s what I want to get across,” she said. “People who thought they were set for life lose their apartments. They are forced onto the streets. And when you have no address, you might as well be dead.”
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The resulting made-for-TV movie — and all the maudlin messaging that description suggests — was Stone Pillow, with Daphne Zuniga as a New York social worker who learns from an elderly bag lady (Ball) who lives in a nearby doorway. If you’ve got a spare 90 minutes, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.
Did Ball have the acting chops to pull off the role of a homeless woman in 1980s New York? Her fans thought so, leaving plenty of ALL-CAPS ACCOLADES on Rotten Tomatoes:
- “It was a WONDERFUL movie!” wrote one viewer. “Portrayed what really happens if you have no money and no home address.”
- “I’ve never been a fan of Lucille Ball or I Love Lucy,” wrote another, “but this was a really GREAT but sad movie with a very happy ending. It’s a shame this movie is overlooked & very underrated. Lucille Ball was great in her role as NYC bag lady.”
- Professional critics were less kind. The New York Times called Stone Pillow a “carefully contrived concoction, earnest but not above being cute and nearly outrageous in its determination to jerk a few tears.”
That’s a rave compared to the Los Angeles Times’ review. “You have to love Lucy a lot to sit through Stone Pillow. And even that may not be enough,” wrote critic Howard Rosenberg. He didn’t much care for Ball’s turn in a movie that was “distractingly oozy, maudlin and manipulative.”
And yet! Stone Pillow proved to the networks that Ball still had the goods, at least when it came to delivering ratings. The movie finished in that week’s top 10 shows, prompting ABC to offer Ball yet another sitcom, Life With Lucy, the following season. If the intention behind the project was Ball getting back to work, then Stone Pillow proved itself a success.
