The veteran stage and television actor’s role as the savvy Trixie Norton on The Honeymooners provided the perfect foil to her dimwitted TV husband.
Joyce Randolph, a veteran stage and television actress 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.
The Honeymooners was an affectionate look at Brooklyn tenement life, based in part on star Jackie Gleason’s childhood. Gleason played the blustering bus driver Ralph Kramden. Audrey Meadows was his wisecracking, strong-willed wife Alice, and Art Carney the cheerful sewer worker Ed Norton. Alice and Trixie often found themselves commiserating over their husbands’ various follies and mishaps, whether unknowingly marketing dogfood as a popular snack or trying in vain to resist a rent hike, or freezing in the winter as their heat is shut off.
Randolph would later cite a handful of favorite episodes, including one in which Ed is sleepwalking.
« And Carney calls out, ‘Thelma?!’ He never knew his wife’s real name, » she later told the Television Academy Foundation.
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.
