Joyce Randolph, Trixie on ‘The Honeymooners,’ Dies at 99
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Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie, the wife of Art Carney’s goofy sewer worker Ed Norton, on the classic sitcom The Honeymooners, has died. She was 99.
Randolph, the last surviving member of the famous foursome that also included the stars Jackie Gleason (as Brooklyn bus driver Ralph Kramden) and Audrey Meadows (as Ralph’s level-headed wife, Alice), died Saturday at her home in New York, her son, Randy, told TMZ.
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Gleason spotted Randolph doing a commercial for Clorets and hired her to play Trixie on his DuMont network variety show Cavalcade of Stars, which premiered in 1951 and featured the Kramdens and the Nortons — neighbors in a rundown Bensonhurst apartment building — in a recurring skit.
Randolph continued on CBS’ The Jackie Gleason Show and then on The Honeymooners when it was spun off in 1955-56 as a half-hour sitcom recorded in front of a live audience. That season is known for the “classic 39” episodes seen most often in syndication.
She and Meadows had worked together in a summer-stock production of No, No, Nanette the year before Randolph landed the Trixie role. (Meadows replaced Pert Kelton, the original Alice, for The Jackie Gleason Show.)
Gleason famously chose not to rehearse, making for some nervous performers.
“We just played ourselves,” Randolph, who made $500 an episode for the 39 classic installments, told The New York Times in 2012. “Nobody told us to characterize in any way. It was learn those lines and go on.”
Of the four main characters, Randolph had the least to do. Asked by Larry King in 2002 if she had a favorite episode, she replied: “Oh, I love them all, but I love the sleepwalking one [when Norton wanders downstairs while snoozing]. And oh, any show in which I had more than six or seven lines I really loved.”
A native of Detroit, Randolph performed in local theater before moving to New York to pursue her career. She appeared on Broadway in 1950 in the comedy Ladies Night in a Turkish Bath and did some early television for the General Electric Co. before joining Gleason’s troupe.
Though The Honeymooners continued in various forms for years, Randolph never played Trixie for Gleason after the last of the classic 39 episodes. She did portray the character on the quirky 1991-92 ABC sitcom Hi Honey, I’m Home, which also brought back Meadows as Alice.
In October 2017, Randolph was on the red carpet for the premiere of The Honeymooners: The Musical at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey.
She was married to marketing executive Richard Charles from 1955 until his death in 1997 at age 74.
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