Before she became the iconic redheaded queen of television comedy, a 22-year-old Lucille Ball made her big Hollywood breakthrough as an uncredited Goldwyn Girl in Samuel Goldwyn’s Pre-Code musical comedy Roman Scandals (1933).
Working in New York as a Hattie Carnegie fashion model (under the name Diane Belmont), Ball was chosen as one of six models brought to Los Angeles by producer Samuel Goldwyn specifically to join the troupe of chorus dancers for the Eddie Cantor vehicle.
To play the part of a Roman slave girl, Lucille Ball wore a dramatic, long blonde wig that made her nearly unrecognizable compared to her later trademark red hair. The film features intricate, massive musical numbers choreographed by the legendary Busby Berkeley. In the famous “No More Love” slave market sequence, Ball and several other dancers were chained to a wall. According to her autobiography, the women wore nothing but their long blonde wigs for the scene, which had to be filmed away from studio censors.
Ball often credited Berkeley’s notoriously rigorous rehearsals as her trial-by-fire introduction to film work, teaching her essential technical precision in front of the camera. During the grueling production, she fainted while chained up high in the set rotunda. Her breakaway chains gave way, but an extra playing a slave driver caught her before she could hit the hot studio lights.
The “Goldwyn Girls” were Samuel Goldwyn’s elite stock troupe of chorus girls, serving as a launching pad for several future stars. Alongside Ball in the movie’s cast list were other young, up-and-coming actresses like Paulette Goddard and Barbara Pepper. The exposure from this film helped Ball secure a string of subsequent 1930s film roles with RKO Radio Pictures, eventually paving her way to Hollywood royalty.
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