Lucille Ball was the most famous female comedian in the world by the time she died at age 77 on April 26, 1989.

I Love Lucy, her classic 1950s TV series, was seen in scores of countries and dubbed into even more languages. It ran up to four times a day in some U.S. markets, a black-and-white staple of mugging and marital hijinks.

All the world, it seemed, loved Lucy. Alas, in the years following her death, all the world seemed to write a book about her, from hagiographic scrapbooks to tell-all tomes. What could possibly be left to say about the first lady of comedy - an entertainer whose rubbery face and physicality elevated farce to a whole new level?

Plenty, as it turns out, although the major strength of Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball is context. Biographer Stefan Kanfer delivers more than "just the facts" as he chronicles Ball's rise from a broken home in Jamestown, N.Y., through her days as a supporting player in Hollywood and her eventual TV superstardom. He reveals a woman who wielded real power at a time when Hollywood was ruled by men.

Yet even at the height of her fame, Ball was not a woman who could have it all. The Lucy Ricardo viewers saw on the TV screen masked a workaholic who rarely saw her children, yet who tried to salvage her marriage to Desi Arnaz Sr., the Cuban musician whose passion for Lucy drove her to new levels of fame, yet whose passion for the bottle would ultimately destroy much of what they achieved together.

Kanfer is careful neither to demonize nor sanitize Lucille Ball. He approaches his subject with affection, but also a welcome honesty. Only the first 30 pages of the book deal with her formative years in Jamestown, but they include her first foray to New York at age 13 to try out for a chorus line (she was sent home once her age was discovered). Another trip to New York a few years later also ended in failure; she was kicked out of the acting school where the star pupil was Bette Davis.

Eventually, she did make it in New York, landing a job in Manhattan as a showroom model for Hattie Carnegie. That proved her ticket to Hollywood: Upon watching the svelte, blonde Lucille glide around the showroom (her trademark henna hair would come much later), an agent suggested she head to Hollywood and become a "Goldwyn Girl."

And so she did, but not to the instantaneous acclaim she expected. For years, Lucy appeared in a string of forgettable movies: Broadway Through A Keyhole, The Bowery, Blood Money. Yet her flair for comedy was evident early on, leading to appearances with The Three Stooges in Three Little Pigskins and even a small role in The Marx Brothers' Room Service.

Still, A-list movie stardom eluded Lucy, as it would for much of her life. Instead, she turned her attention to radio - her infectious voice was a natural for the medium - and from there to TV. It was Arnaz, whom she met while he was starring on Broadway and married in 1940, who pushed her to try her hand at the new medium. And it was Lucy who insisted that CBS accept Arnaz as part of the package when the network said they liked the concept but not his heavy Cuban accent.

As it turned out, Arnaz was a formidable behind-the-scenes talent. He was able to secure top writers, a top lighting designer and convince the network to let him shoot the show live before an audience using a three-camera setup. No one, save the stars, gave I Love Lucy a chance of succeeding. It did, of course. Big time.

Yet even as I Love Lucy dominated the ratings, other aspects of Ball's life were in disarray. Her children were essentially raised by nannies, Kanfer writes, and son Desi Jr. drifted into drugs. Although Desilu, the studio Lucy and Desi founded, produced some major shows (The Untouchables, Star Trek), Lucy struggled with insecurity and a husband who was a serial philanderer. Their fights and reconciliations were legendary.

There was also her flirtation with the Communist Party in the 1930s (she claimed to have registered to appease an activist grandfather), which came back to haunt her when she was summoned before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in the late '50s. She survived the negative publicity that resulted, but she never forgot how tenuous her hold was on popularity. Everything for which she'd worked so hard could easily have been swept away in a political firestorm.

Kanfer's strongest writing is reserved for the last third of the book, which offers a bittersweet look at an aging comedian trying to hold onto her youth.

After her divorce from Desi (who sold the original I Love Lucy reruns to CBS for $5 million; they've since generated 50 times that much in syndication), Ball starred in Here's Lucy and other TV variations of her signature series, yet none could touch the success of the '50s classic. She married comedian Gary Morton, tried her hand at Broadway and made a series of critically lambasted TV movies. Lucy's problem, as Kanfer poignantly illustrates, was not knowing when to exit gracefully. She lived for the spotlight, and when it dimmed, she died.

In the end, Ball of Fire chronicles a woman whose passion for performing eclipsed everything else in her life. She could be vain and cantankerous; she could mistreat family and staffers. But during a hardscrabble life that saw her claw her way into the elite circles of showbiz, she never underestimated the importance of laughter in people's lives. She was a clown princess who constantly put herself on the line for a good gag.

Yet for all her wealth and celebrity, Lucy was never a happy woman. Contentment was elusive. She worked hard to achieve her success, but she never learned how to enjoy it. Here was a woman who, despite being loved by millions, found herself crying all the way to the bank. Sometimes, literally.

Mike Pearson is features editor. pearsonm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2592