I LOVE LUCY Star Recalls Miraculous Salvation Story
By Movieguide® Staff
I LOVE LUCY is considered one of the hallmarks of early television, starring the charismatic Lucille Ball as the title character who became an icon in comedy.
However, for actor Keith Thibodeaux, who played the character Little Ricky, his experience on the show was far from normal.
As a child actor, Thibodeaux recalled how I LOVE LUCY nearly ruined his life until God came to the rescue.
“I was about four and a half years old at the time and my dad said, ‘Keith this is really important. This is a really big show in Hollywood.’ I knew from my father’s explanation that it was something big,” he said in a recent interview with CBN News.
It was big. The year was 1956 and little Keith Thibodeaux from Lafayette, Louisiana, was auditioning for one of the most popular TV series in the world: “I Love Lucy”.
After four years on the show, Thibodeaux became a fan favorite and later landed a role on the ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW as Johnny Paul.
“I began to ask my dad, ‘Why did God pick me to do this? He could’ve picked any little boy to play the part of Little Ricky.’ My dad said, ‘Well, God’s got a purpose for you, Keith.’ And that always stuck in my mind, that even way back then, I felt like God had His eyes on me,” Thibodeaux continued.
However, Thibodeaux’s life took a turn after his father was unfaithful.
“My dad was unfaithful to my mother. My whole life came crashing down when that happened. I thought our family was one unit and all of a sudden, it was not. And the dad that I thought I had was not the dad that he was,” he said. “I was mad at my father, and was very, very mad at everything, and the world in general, and show business was part of the problem. I felt like, if I hadn’t gotten the part on ‘I Love Lucy,’ we would still be in Louisiana, and our family would still be together. But God was the one that I really shook my fist at.”
But due to his success in Hollywood, Thibodeaux turned to the party scene.
“My friends began to do drugs, and so I began to just get in with them and do that. I wanted to be cool,” he said. “I knew there was a supernatural world. And I began to dabble in Ouija boards and reading books about warlocks, and just fantasizing about those kinds of things. And my life, from that point on, really began to take a downward spiral.”
“I began to be tormented by these voices. These were demonic voices that were telling me to kill myself and ‘nobody likes you’, and ‘you are just a nobody’,” he added.
Thibodeaux had contemplated suicide, but remembered the words of his father: that God had a purpose for his life.
“Finally, I cried out to God and I said, ‘If You’re real, if You take me out of this mess that I made of my life, then I’ll serve You.”
He continued: “I prayed and I fell into a trance, or a vision—I don’t know of any other word to explain it. There was this light in the distance that got closer and closer to me. As it got closer to me, I could see that there was a man, and that person revealed himself as Jesus of Nazareth. And I said, ‘Jesus, I’m not worthy of You to appear to me in such a way.’ And I said, ‘What about this sin?’ and ‘What about that sin?’ Jesus responded to me and He said, ‘That’s why I died’.”
“I came up out of the vision, and I had a whole new perspective of who God was, and who Jesus Christ was, and what that meant to me, and what He did for me on the cross—dying on the cross, and taking my sins,” he said.
- Content: +3Share:
- Content: +1