Questão de Inglês — Tipos de Discurso (Direct e Reported Speech) — COPERSE UFRGS 2025

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In the years since she captured the American imagination, much has been written about Lucille Ball. While some accounts portray her life as a romp, others portray her as chronically miserable, tense, and unhappy. None of the many books devoted to her or to I Love Lucy has explained who she was, her contradictions and the source of her ambition.

........ her peak, her comedic mastery seemed effortless, but in fact, in the films Lucille Ball made in the thirties and forties with The Three Stooges, The Marx Brothers, Edgar Bergen, and Harold Lloyd, she was wooden. She appears to have been no more aware than her co-stars of her natural gifts. How did so apparently ordinary a performer discover her great genius? How did she later remain so seemingly humble in the face of her hold on the American public? Lucille Ball is one of the greatest performing artists America has produced and probably the most familiar ........ virtue of the reach of television. Her work is on a par with that of Chaplin or Keaton, but because her shows are rerun every day – several times in some markets, and even more often ........ cable systems – her virtuosity may have become too accessible to achieve the mystique of art. Admittedly, she did not write and direct her own material as Chaplin and Keaton did, and although her greatest character, Lucy Ricardo, is a brilliant creation, she cannot be judged profound. While Chaplin's Little Tramp outwits his betters, and Keaton stoically bungles into success, both of these classic clowns remain poignant and heroic strugglers against life and fate. Lucy Ricardo, in contrast, rebels the way most people rebel – without intending to abandon what is comfortable about her life. That she is doomed to fail in show business is not a thing of tragedy, for her talent lies in the realm of havoc and tricks. A blend of incompetence and cunning, she inspires laughter with her subversion of the conventional, and her exaggerated way with the commonplace. In sum, Lucy Ricardo defies the imperatives that mold lesser souls – reason and judgment, propriety and the prudent course – and proclaims that one dogged individual can prevail on her own illogical terms.

Biographers seldom have an opportunity to meet their subjects, but ........ the last day of June 1986, I met Lucille Ball. Had I never spent time with her, I doubt I could have understood what a puzzle she presented. Each of her changing moods had a force and intensity that she herself did not entirely command.

I went to see her on assignment for Working Woman magazine. When her maid answered the door in Beverly Hills, the theme of I Love Lucy was playing in the house, as if my ringing the bell had cued the waiting band. I sat expectantly on a green armchair in her citrus-colored den until I heard, "Kathleen! I'm late! Don't shake my hand, my nails are wet. Shake my elbow!" Wearing a pink jogging suit, she strutted in, elbow first. She was a few months shy of her seventy-fifth birthday, a fact she could not deny because for three decades her age was a published fact, but she tried to obscure the obvious signs of time by wearing large glasses tinted as blue as her eyes were supposed to be. She had dropped the curtain on the exaggerated expressions that delighted her audience, but still cultivated her trademark carrot-colored curls.

Extraído de: BRADY, Kathleen. Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball . Hyperion, 1994.