'I Love Lucy' writer Madelyn Pugh Davis dies at 90

Madelyn Pugh Davis, a pioneering female comedy writer who co-wrote the pilot episode of I Love Lucy — and worked with Lucille Ball for four decades — has died after a brief illness, the L.A. Times reports. Davis, along with her writing partner Bob Carroll Jr. and writer/producer Jess Oppenheimer, penned over 125 episodes of Ball’s signature sitcom during its first four seasons. She continued writing for the show through the rest of its six-year run and also contributed to Ball’s next projects: The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, Here’s Lucy, and the comedian’s last series, Life With Lucy. Davis and Carroll were twice nominated for Emmy awards for their work on the original Lucy; they also received the Writers Guild of America’s Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for achievement in television writing in 1992. “Madelyn was such a class act,” Ball’s daughter Lucie Arnaz told the Times. “She was a very private person, very soft-spoken, genteel, feminine — all those lovely words you associate with great ladies. And yet she had the ability to write this wacky, insane comedy for my mother.“