NEW YORK — Joyce Randolph, a veteran stage and television actor whose role as the savvy Trixie Norton on “The Honeymooners” provided the perfect foil to her dimwitted TV husband, has died. She 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 Sunday.
She was the last surviving main character of the beloved comedy from television’s golden age of the 1950s.
Randolph would later cite a handful of favorite episodes, including one in which Ed is sleepwalking.
Originating in 1950 as a recurring skit on Gleason’s variety show, “Cavalcade of Stars,” “The Honeymooners” still ranks among the all-time favorites of television comedy. The show grew in popularity after Gleason switched networks with “The Jackie Gleason Show.” Later, for one season in 1955-56, it became a full-fledged series.
In an interview with The New York Times in January 2007, Randolph said she received no compensation in residuals for those 39 episodes. She said she finally began getting royalties with the discovery of “lost” episodes from the variety hours.
After five years as a member of Gleason’s on-the-air repertory company, Randolph virtually retired, opting to focus full-time on marriage and motherhood.
Randolph said the show’s impact on television viewers didn’t 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 mom really Trixie?’” she told The San Antonio Express in 2000. “I guess he hadn’t paid much attention before then.”
Earlier, she had lamented that playing Trixie limited her career.
“For years after that role, directors would say: ‘No, we can’t use her. She’s too well-known as Trixie,’” Randolph told the Orlando Sentinel in 1993.
