Joyce Randolph, a veteran stage and television actress whose role as the savvy Trixie Norton in The Honeymooners provided the perfect foil to her dimwitted TV husband, has died aged 99.
Randolph died of natural causes on Saturday at her home in New York, her son Randolph Charles told The Associated Press on Sunday.
She was the last surviving main character of the beloved comedy from US 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.
Randolph would later cite a handful of favourite 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 favourites of US 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 US 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.
After five years as a member of Gleason’s on-the-air repertory company, Randolph virtually retired, opting to focus full-time on marriage and motherhood.
“I didn’t miss a thing by not working all the time,” she said. “I didn’t want a nanny raising (my) wonderful son.”
But decades after leaving the show, Randolph still had many admirers and received dozens of letters a week.
Randolph said the show’s impact on television viewers did not dawn on her until the early 1980s.
“One year while (my son) was in college at Yale, he came home and said, ’Did you know that guys and girls come up to me and ask, ‘Is your mom really Trixie?’” she said in 2000. “I guess he hadn’t paid much attention before then.”
Earlier, she had lamented that playing Trixie limited her career.
“For years after that role, directors would say ‘No, we can’t use her. She’s too well-known as Trixie’,” Randolph said in 1993.
Gleason died in 1987 aged 71, followed by Meadows in 1996 and Carney in 2003. Gleason had revived The Honeymooners in the 1960s, with Jane Kean as Trixie.
Randolph was born Joyce Sirola in Detroit in 1924, and was about 19 when she joined a road company of Stage Door. From there she went to New York and performed in a number of Broadway shows.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, she was seen often on TV, appearing with such stars as Eddie Cantor, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Danny Thomas and Fred Allen.
Randolph met Gleason for the first time when she did a commercial on Cavalcade Of Stars, and The Great One took a liking to her. She did not even have an agent at the time.
Her husband, Richard Lincoln, a wealthy marketing executive who died in 1997, was president of the Lambs, a theatrical club, and she reigned as “first lady”. They had one son, Charles.
