Joyce Randolph, 'Honeymooners' actress in beloved comedy, dies at 99

NEW YORK — “Honeymooners” actress Joyce Randolph, who played Ed Norton’s sarcastic wife Trixie, 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. 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.

In an interview with The New York Times in January 2007, Randolph said she received no compensation in residuals for those 39 episodes. She said she finally began getting royalties with the discovery of “lost” episodes from the variety hours.

Elaine Stritch was the first actress to portray Trixie in a sketch on "Cavalcade of Stars," which was a much grittier version of Randolph's version.

"That first Trixie certainly did not resemble my much more wholesome version of her," Randolph previously told Forbes. "The pacing was frantic when we did 'The Honeymooners.'  The script was delivered to my apartment in Manhattan and a few days later we went and did the show live. Jackie was against doing rehearsals. He wanted everything to be spontaneous, which for me was no issue. I never had that many lines, after all."

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Before her time on "Honeymooners," Randolph got her start on Broadway's "Ladies Night in a Turkish Bath" in 1950. She also took smaller roles on television.

"She joked that often she'd play the part of the young woman who ended up as the corpse in the murder mystery. So they used to call her the ‘most murdered girl’ on television," her son told Fox News on Sunday.

He added: "In addition to being a wonderful actress, she was a wonderful mom and loving wife."

Contributing: Naledi Ushe, USA TODAY

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