Joyce Randolph, Last Surviving Cast Member of ‘The Honeymooners,’ Dead at 99

Joyce Randolph, the last of the surviving cast members of The Honeymooners, has died. Her son confirmed her death, of natural causes, at her Manhattan home on Saturday night to the Associated Press. She was 99.

From 1955 to 1956, over what is known as The Honeymooners’ “Classic 39” episodes, Randolph starred as Trixie Norton, the patient, supportive wife to doltish sewer worker Ed Norton, played by Art Carney. Together as the Nortons, they were the upstairs neighbors and de facto best friends to loudmouthed bus driver Ralph Kramden and his long-suffering wife Alice, famously played by The Honeymooners creator Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows. “The four of us get along like the Three Musketeers,” Carney’s Norton quipped in one episode.

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While Alice gave as good as she got from Gleason’s blustering, threatening Ralph, Trixie often just rolled her eyes at Ed’s well-intentioned foibles — like when he purchased her an orange-juice squeezer in the shape of Napoleon as a Christmas gift. Likewise, she was all but bereft when a disappointed Ed was called into work for a sewer emergency on the night of the Racoon Lodge’s costume party (the “Racoons” spelled their name with only one “c”). Credit that to Randolph’s ability to play sympathetic so effortlessly, a trait Gleason no doubt noticed when he cast her to appear on his Cavalcade of Stars, the series that birthed The Honeymooners as a sketch in 1951.

But Trixie was no pushover, and Randolph summoned righteous indignation whenever Ed was out of line. In the “Classic 39” standout “Hello Mom,” she storms out to spend the night with Alice after Ed disrepects his mother-in-law. “Ed Norton, I wouldn’t stay another minute in this house with you!” Randolph huffs.

Randolph’s association with The Honeymooners left her forever identified as Trixie Norton and she all but gave up acting after the series ended, declining to participate in a revival of the sketch on The Jackie Gleason Show in 1966 (Meadows passed too). But the show also played a role in Randolph’s marriage. On Oct. 2, 1955 — the day after the series premiered on CBS — Randolph married Dick Charles, who was introduced to the actress by The Honeymooners’ costume designer at the cast’s favorite bar.

“We used to go to Sam’s on Saturday night and one night Peggy and her husband, Dave, brought this handsome guy over to meet some of the girls,” Randolph said in the book The Official Honeymooners Treasury. “Five months later we got married.”

Randolph was the last surviving member of the show’s core four cast members: Gleason died in 1987, Meadows in 1996, and Carney in 2003.

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