Actress Joyce Randolph, Trixie on classic TV sitcom The Honeymooners, dies at 99

NEW YORK – American actress Joyce Randolph, who played the peppy working-class Brooklyn housewife Trixie on The Honeymooners and was the last surviving cast member of the seminal 1950s sitcom starring late actor Jackie Gleason, died on Jan 13 in her Manhattan home, her family told media. She was 99.

Her son Randolph Charles confirmed the death to the media, including People and TMZ. He told the Associated Press on Jan 14 that she died of natural causes.

The Honeymooners starred Gleason – one of the top stars of the “golden age of television” – as bus driver Ralph Kramden, actress Audrey Meadows as his wisecracking wife Alice, actor Art Carney as Ralph’s best friend and neighbour Ed Norton, and Randolph as Ed’s wife.

The foursome starred from 1951 to 1957 in The Honeymooners, either as a segment in one of Gleason’s popular variety shows, or as a stand-alone series during the 1955 to 1956 single TV season.

The show was set in a Brooklyn apartment building and focused on decidedly blue-collar characters.

Gleason’s short-tempered Ralph chased get-rich-quick dreams that invariably did not lead to a pot of gold. Carney’s sewer-worker character drove Ralph crazy, and both wives leaned towards the bossy side.

But the characters all had a soft side – even Ralph, who one moment would threaten to knock his wife “to the moon”, and the next would tell her: “Baby, you’re the greatest.”

Experts consistently ranked The Honeymooners among the top TV comedies made.

With Carney’s death in 2003, Randolph became the last survivor of the cast. Gleason died in 1987 and Meadows in 1996.

Randolph, who was born on Oct 21, 1924, moved from her native Detroit to New York to pursue acting and performed in the early days of television.

She got her big break based on a commercial she did for Clorets chewing gum on the old DuMont Television Network, the home of Gleason’s Cavalcade Of Stars variety show (1949 to 1952). Gleason noticed the “Clorets girl” and offered her the part of Trixie when he was casting The Honeymooners skits.

“Trixie was married to a sewer worker, and I guess she considered herself a little better than the character of Ed Norton,” Randolph said in a 1999 interview with the Archive of American Television. “But she was just a housewife. She and Alice didn’t have jobs. They stayed home all the time, which was kind of amazing. But the husbands didn’t want them to work.”

Randolph said that despite her character’s superior attitude, it was mentioned twice during the series that she may have been a dancer in burlesque before becoming Mrs Norton.

Known as a very difficult star, Gleason was famous for his aversion to rehearsal – he wanted performances to feel spontaneous – and the cast was often given the final script just the night before shooting.

“Nobody worked like that in one day,” Randolph told journalist Jane Wollman Rusoff in 2012. “It was ridiculous. But Jackie wanted it fresh. He was the boss and theatrically brilliant – a strange, immensely talented man.”

She said Gleason displayed extreme mood swings.

“You never knew whether he would show up on Saturday morning in a ‘Black Irish’ mood or if he’d be jovial,” she added.

After The Honeymooners, Randolph performed in commercials and did stage work. She did not appear in the 1960s revival of The Honeymooners, which had actress Jane Kean in the part of Trixie.

Randolph had one child with her husband, retired advertising executive Richard Charles. He died in 1997. REUTERS