NEW YORK (AP) — Joyce Randolph, the veteran stage and television actress whose role as the smart-alecky Trixie Norton in “The Honeymooners” served as the perfect foil for her faded TV husband, has died. It was 99.
Randolph died of natural causes Saturday night at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, her son, Randolph Charles, told The Associated Press on Sunday.
She was the last surviving main character of the beloved sitcom from the Golden Age of Television in the 1950s.
“The Honeymooners” was an affectionate look at tenement life in Brooklyn, based in part on star Jackie Gleason’s childhood. Gleeson played brash bus driver Ralph Kramden. Audrey Meadows was his wise and strong-willed wife Alice, and Art Carney was the cheerful sewer worker Ed Norton. Alice and Trixie often found themselves sympathizing with their husbands’ various indiscretions and mishaps, whether they were inadvertently marketing dog food as a popular snack, trying in vain to resist rising rent, or freezing in the winter with their heat cut off.
Randolph later cited a few favorite episodes, including one in which Ed sleepwalks.
“And Carney calls out, ‘Thelma?!'” “He never knew his wife’s real name,” she later told the Television Academy Foundation.
Originating in 1950 as a recurring skit on Gleason’s variety show “Cavalcade of Stars,” “The Honeymooners” still ranks among the best television comedy shows of all time. The show’s popularity increased after Gleason switched networks to “The Jackie Gleason Show.” Later, for one season in 1955-1956, it became a full series.
Those 39 episodes became a staple of syndicated programming broadcast across the country and abroad.
In an interview with The New York Times in January 2007, Randolph said she received no remaining compensation for those 39 episodes. She said she finally began receiving royalties with the discovery of “missing” episodes from hours of variety programming.
After five years as a member of Gleason’s on-air company, Randolph effectively retired, choosing to focus full-time on marriage and motherhood.
Actress Joyce Randolph attends the Museum of the Moving Image’s tribute to Ben Stiller at 42 Cipriani Street on November 12, 2008, in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Agostini, File)
“I haven’t missed anything by not working all the time,” she said. “I didn’t want a nanny to raise my wonderful son.”
But decades after leaving the series, Randolph still had many fans and received dozens of letters a week. She was a regular at Sardi’s downstairs bar well into her 80s, where she loved to sip her favorite mixture of White Cadillac – Dewar’s and milk – and chat with customers who recognized her from a photo of the four sitcom characters above the bar.
Randolph said the show’s impact on television viewers did not dawn on her until the early 1980s.
“One year, while (my son) was in college at Yale, he came home and said, ‘Did you know that guys and girls come up to me and ask, ‘Is your mother really Trixie?’” she told the San Antonio Express. In 2000. “I guess he didn’t pay much attention before that.”
Earlier, she lamented that playing Trixie limited her career.
“For years after that role, directors would say, ‘No, we can’t use her.’ She’s very well known as Trixie,” Randolph told the Orlando Sentinel in 1993.
Gleason died in 1987 at the age of 71, followed by Meadows in 1996 and Carney in 2003. Gleason revived The Honeymooners in the 1960s, with Jane Kane in the role of Trixie.
Born Randolph Joyce Sirola in Detroit in 1924, she was about 19 when she joined the Stage Door road company. From there, she went to New York and performed in a number of Broadway shows.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, she was frequently seen on television, appearing with such stars as Eddie Cantor, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Danny Thomas, and Fred Allen.
Randolph first met Gleason when she did a Clorets commercial for “Cavalcade of Stars,” and she liked The Great One; She didn’t even have an agent at the time.
Randolph spent her retirement going to Broadway openings and fundraising, being active with the USO and visiting other favorite Manhattan haunts, among them Angus, Che Josephine, and the Lamb’s Club.
Her husband, Richard Lincoln, a wealthy marketing executive who died in 1997, served as president of the Lamb’s Theater Club, and she was its “first lady.” They had one son, Charles.
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AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr contributed.