Lucille Ball once revealed her favorite episode of I Love Lucy – and her answer was surprising, given the beating she took while filming it.
During a 1974 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, Ball responded to the audience with one word when asked to name her favorite episode from the classic TV sitcom she starred in with her then-husband, Desi Arnaz, from 1951 to 1957.
“Grapes,” she said.
Ball was referring to the iconic 1956 episode “Lucy’s Italian Movie,” which aired 70 years ago on April 16, 1956. Ball teamed up with an Italian actress, Teresa Tirelli, for a famous grape-stomping scene during her character Lucy Ricardo’s trip to Italy. But things went awry when Tirelli reportedly went off-script and got overly physical with Ball in the grape-stomping vat.
“Our director didn’t speak Italian,” Ball told host Dick Cavett. “I didn’t speak Italian, no one spoke Italian. …[Tirelli] was told that there would be a fight, and it was also explained to her that there were times when my legs had to come up in this huge vat of real grapes.”
“I slipped and when I slipped, I hit her, accidentally. And she took offense. So, she hauled off and let me have it … it took all the wind out of me,” Ball continued. “She had been told that we were to stay down for a while, give me a chance to get my legs way up so that they’d show in the camera. Then, up would come an arm…My head was supposed to pop [up]. Well, my head never popped up. She kept me down by the throat. And she was choking me, and I am really beating her to get her off. I was drowning in these grapes. She was killing me.”
Producers reportedly didn’t intervene because they knew the scene would be a hit with fans. But Ball lamented of Tirelli, “She spent so much time beating the hell out of me in the vat, we had to cut half of it.”
The lack of communication may not have been a language barrier
Ball’s story on Cavett’s show alluded to the fact that Tirelli didn’t speak English. But I Love Lucy producer Jess Oppenheimer’s son, Gregg, stated on Facebook in 2024, “Any stories you may have heard that the Italian woman in the vat spoke no English, or that Lucy nearly drowned, are simply untrue. The fight scene in the grape vat was carefully rehearsed all week. The Italian actress, Teresa Tirelli, was a card-carrying SAG member who spoke perfect English. She later appeared in the TV series Dr. Kildare and as a midwife in The Godfather Part II.”
Oppenheimer directed fans to get the full behind-the-scenes in his father’s book, Laughs, Luck and Lucy.
But when one fan asked, “But isn’t Lucy partly to blame for the story of the Italian actress not speaking English and nearly drowning Lucy?” Oppenheimer explained.
“You’re right,” he wrote. “Lucille Ball was not only a great actress, but a great storyteller, and she loved to tell them. One of the traits she shared with Lucy Ricardo was a rich imagination, and sometimes she used it to embellish her stories, including this one.”
Tirelli, who was also a renowned classical singer, died in June 1989 at age 81, per a UPI obituary, just two months after Ball’s death that April at age 77.