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.
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.
Those 39 episodes became a staple of syndicated programming aired all over the country and beyond.
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.
“I didn’t miss a thing by not working all the time,” she said. “I didn’t want a nanny raising (my) wonderful son.”
But decades after leaving the show, Randolph still had many admirers and received dozens of letters a week. She was a regular into her 80s at the downstairs bar at Sardi’s, where she liked to sip her favorite White Cadillac concoction — Dewar’s and milk — and chat with patrons who recognized her from a portrait of the sitcom’s four characters over the bar.
“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.
Gleason died in 1987 at age 71, followed by Meadows in 1996 and Carney in 2003. Gleason had revived “The Honeymooners” in the 1960s, with Jane Kean as Trixie.
