The Related Press
Revealed Sunday, January 14, 2024 5:29 pm EST
Final up to date Sunday January 14, 2024 5:29 pm EST
NEW YORK (AP) — Joyce Randolph, a veteran stage and tv actress whose function because the brainy Trixie Norton on “The Honeymooners” was the right foil for her dim-witted TV husband, has died. She was 99 years outdated.
Randolph died of pure causes Saturday night time at his house on Manhattan’s Higher West Facet, his son Randolph Charles informed The Related Press on Sunday.
She was the final surviving important character from the beloved comedy from tv’s golden age of the 1950s.
“The Honeymooners” was an affectionate take a look at life within the Brooklyn tenements, based mostly partially on star Jackie Gleason’s childhood. Gleason performed swaggering bus driver Ralph Kramden. Audrey Meadows was his spouse, his wisecracking and decided Alice, and Artwork Carney was the cheerful sewer employee Ed Norton. Alice and Trixie usually commiserated over their husbands’ numerous follies and mishaps, whether or not unknowingly advertising pet food as a preferred snack, or making an attempt in useless to withstand a lease improve, or freezing within the winter when the electrical energy is reduce off. heating.
Randolph would later cite a few of his favourite episodes, together with one wherein Ed sleepwalks.
“And Carney yells, ‘Thelma?!’ “He by no means knew his spouse’s actual title,” he later informed the Tv Academy Basis.
Originating in 1950 as a recurring skit on Gleason’s selection present, “Cavalcade of Stars,” “The Honeymooners” nonetheless ranks among the many favourite tv comedies of all time. The present gained reputation after Gleason switched networks with “The Jackie Gleason Present.” Later, for one season in 1955-56, it turned a full-fledged collection.
These 39 episodes turned a staple of syndicated programming airing throughout the nation and past.
In an interview with The New York Instances in January 2007, Randolph mentioned he acquired no residual compensation for these 39 episodes. She mentioned that she lastly started receiving royalties with the invention of “misplaced” episodes of selection exhibits.
After 5 years as a member of Gleason’s reside repertory firm, Randolph nearly retired, selecting to focus full time on marriage and motherhood.
“I did not miss something by not working on a regular basis,” he mentioned. “I did not desire a nanny to lift (my) great son.”
However many years after leaving the present, Randolph nonetheless had many followers and acquired dozens of letters every week. She was an everyday in her 80s on the downstairs bar at Sardi’s, the place she appreciated to drink her favourite White Cadillac concoction (Dewar’s and milk) and chat with clients who acknowledged her from a portrait of the 4 characters from the comedy. on the bar.
Randolph mentioned the present’s impression on viewers wasn’t realized till the early 1980s.
“One yr, whereas (my son) was in faculty at Yale, he got here house and mentioned, ‘Do you know that guys and ladies come as much as me and ask, ‘Is your mother actually Trixie?’” she informed The San Antonio Specific. in 2000. “I suppose he hadn’t paid a lot consideration earlier than that.”
Beforehand, she had lamented that enjoying Trixie restricted her profession.
“For years after that function, administrators mentioned, ‘No, we will not use her. She’s too well-known as Trixie,’” Randolph informed the Orlando Sentinel in 1993.
Gleason died in 1987 at age 71, adopted by Meadows in 1996 and Carney in 2003. Gleason had revived “The Honeymooners” within the 1960s, with Jane Kean as Trixie.
Randolph was born Joyce Sirola in Detroit in 1924 and was about 19 when she joined a “Stage Door” touring firm. From there she went to New York and carried out in a number of Broadway exhibits.
Within the late 1940s and early 1950s, she was usually seen on tv, showing with stars akin to Eddie Cantor, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Danny Thomas and Fred Allen.
Randolph first met Gleason when she did a Clorets industrial in “Cavalcade of Stars”, and The Nice One fell in love along with her; she did not even have an agent on the time.
Randolph spent his retirement attending openings and fundraisers on Broadway, being energetic within the USO, and visiting different favourite Manhattan haunts, together with Angus, Chez Josephine, and the Lambs Membership.
Her husband, Richard Lincoln, a rich advertising govt who died in 1997, served as president of the Lambs, a theater membership, and she or he reigned as “first woman.” They’d a son, Charles.
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AP Movie Author Lindsey Bahr contributed.