Lucille Ball attended the John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts in New York City with fellow actress Bette Davis. Ball went home a few weeks later when drama coaches told her that she "had no future at all as a performer." Ball was determined to prove her teachers wrong, and returned to New York City in 1929, where she landed work as a model and later began her performing career on Broadway using the stage name Dianne Belmont. She had some success as the Chesterfield cigarette girl. After an uncredited stint as one of the Goldwyn Girls in Roman Scandals (1933) she permanently moved to Hollywood to appear in films. 
She appeared in many small movie roles in the 1930s as a contract player for RKO Radio Pictures. She was known in many Hollywood circles as "Queen of the B's"—a title previously held by Fay Wray—starring in a number of B-movies, such as 1939's Five Came Back. Ball was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the 1940s, but she never achieved major stardom from her appearance in those films.
She appeared as Daisie Simms in a two-reel comedy short with the Three Stooges (Three Little Pigskins, 1934) and a movie with the Marx Brothers (Room Service, 1938). According to IMDb she appears as an uncredited "girl" at least twenty times in early 1930 films.
She can also be seen as one of the featured models in the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film Roberta (1935) and briefly as the flower girl in Top Hat (1935), as well as a brief supporting role at the beginning of Follow the Fleet (1936), another Astaire-Rogers film.
Ginger Rogers was a distant maternal cousin of Ball's. She and Rogers played aspiring actresses in the hit film Stage Door (1937) co-starring Katharine Hepburn.
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