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Desi Arnaz Jr. on his parents' marriage, on-screen and off
"I learned pretty early to relate I Love Lucy as a TV show and to my parents as actors in it," said Arnaz.
Everyone knows that there's a stark difference between television and reality, but there are certainly times when the lines blur. Real-life couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz created a television empire when they began production on I Love Lucy, where the two played a husband and wife. While the show is fiction, various elements of Ball and Arnaz's lives have been mirrored in the Ricardo's.
One person who was able to see both sides of the two actors was their son, Desi Arnaz Jr. In an interview with the Syracuse Herald-Journal, Arnaz explained that there were times when it was difficult to see the lives his parents led on television, especially when they were encountering difficulties in their real-life marriage.
"I learned pretty early to relate I Love Lucy as a TV show and to my parents as actors in it," Arnaz said.
"There wasn't much relationship between what I saw on TV and what was really going on at home. Those were difficult years - all those funny things happening each week on television to people who looked like my parents, then the same people agonizing through some terrible, unhappy times at home, and each of them trying to convince my sister and me separately that the other was in the wrong."
Of course, the hard times wouldn't last forever. Arnaz explained that although his parents did divorce, they actually remained close as friends. Despite the hardships, the experience seemed to have taught Arnaz a valuable life lesson. "Trying to run away from fear only gives it more importance," he said in an interview with the Courier-Post. "You have to let it rant and rave and see it for what it is, your enemy. A life of fear is no life at all."
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