NEW YORK (AP) — Joyce Randolph, a veteran stage and television actress whose role as the brainy Trixie Norton in “The Honeymooners” was the perfect contrast to her dim-witted TV husband, has died. She was 99.
Randolph died of natural causes Saturday evening at her home on Manhattan's Upper West Side, her son Randolph Charles told The Associated Press on Sunday.
She was the last surviving main character of the popular comedy from the golden age of television in the 1950s.
“The Honeymooners” was a tender look at tenement life in Brooklyn, based in part on star Jackie Gleason’s childhood. Gleason played ranting bus driver Ralph Kramden. Audrey Meadows was his funny, strong-willed wife Alice and Art Carney was the cheerful sewer worker Ed Norton. Alice and Trixie often lamented their husbands' various follies and misadventures, whether they were unknowingly marketing dog food as a popular snack, trying in vain to resist a rent increase, or freezing in the winter because the heat was turned off.
Randolph later cited a handful of favorite episodes, including one in which Ed sleepwalks.
“And Carney shouts, 'Thelma?!' “He never knew his wife’s real name,” she later told the Television Academy Foundation.
“The Honeymooners” originated in 1950 as a recurring sketch on Gleason's variety show “Cavalcade of Stars” and is still one of television comedy's all-time favorites. The show grew in popularity after Gleason changed channels with “The Jackie Gleason Show.” Later, for one season in 1955–56, it became a full-fledged series.
These 39 episodes became a staple of syndicated shows broadcast across the country and beyond.
In a January 2007 interview with The New York Times, Randolph said she received no residual compensation for these 39 episodes. She said that with the discovery of “lost” episodes from the variety hours, she finally received royalties.
After five years as a member of Gleason's on-the-air repertory ensemble, Randolph virtually retired, choosing to focus full-time on marriage and motherhood.
Actress Joyce Randolph visits the Museum of the Moving Image Salute to Ben Stiller on Cipriani's 42nd Street in New York on November 12, 2008. (AP Photo/Evan Agostini, File)
“I didn’t miss anything because I wasn’t working all the time,” she said. “I didn’t want a nanny to raise my wonderful son.”
But decades after his exit from the show, Randolph still had many admirers and received dozens of letters a week. In her 80s, she was a regular at the downstairs bar at Sardi's, where she enjoyed sipping her favorite White Cadillac drinks – Dewar's and milk – and chatting with patrons who recognized her from a portrait of the sitcom's four characters at the bar.
Randolph said she didn't realize the show's impact on television viewers until the early 1980s.
“One year when (my son) was studying at Yale, he came home and said, 'Did you know that men and girls come up to me and say, 'Is your mother really Trixie?'” she told the San Antonio Express in 2000. “I guess he hadn’t paid much attention to it before.”
She had previously complained that the role of Trixie limited her career.
“For years after that role, directors said, 'No, we can't use her.' “She’s too 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 had revived The Honeymooners in the 1960s with Jane Kean as Trixie.
Randolph was born Joyce Sirola in Detroit in 1924 and was about 19 years old when she joined the Stage Door street company. From there she went to New York and appeared in several Broadway shows.
She appeared frequently on television in the late 1940s and early 1950s, appearing with stars such as Eddie Cantor, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Danny Thomas and Fred Allen.
Randolph first met Gleason when she was filming a Clorets commercial for “Cavalcade of Stars,” and The Great One took a liking to her; She didn't even have an agent back then.
Randolph spent her retirement attending Broadway openings and fundraisers, being active in the USO and visiting other popular Manhattan haunts including Angus, Chez Josephine and the Lambs Club.
Her husband, Richard Lincoln, a wealthy marketing executive who died in 1997, was president of the Lambs theater club, and she reigned as “first lady.” They had a son, Charles.
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AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr contributed.