Joyce Randolph Dies: ‘The Honeymooners’ Star Was 99
Joyce Randolph, best known for starring as Trixie Norton on The Honeymooners, has died at the age of 99.
The actress passed away on January 13 in her home in New York City of natural causes, her son, Randolph Richard Charles, told TMZ. She had reportedly been in hospice care.
Randolph played Trixie Norton, the loyal, strong-willed and bossy housewife of Ed Norton (Art Carney) on The Honeymooners, a working-class comedy that ran one season from 1955 to 1956. She did not appear in every episode (while her co-stars did) but brought a hilarious realism to her character that made her memorable to audiences even when she wasn’t onscreen. She was the last surviving cast member of The Honeymooners — Jackie Gleason passed away in 1987, Audrey Meadows in 1996, and Carney in 2003 — and remained one of the most iconic actresses from the Golden Age of television.
Randolph was born Joyce Sirola on October 21, 1924 in Detroit, Michigan, and moved to New York City at the age of 19 to pursue acting. She then found herself on Broadway, with her acting career launching when she joined the touring company of the play Stage Door. She worked her way up from chorus girl to featured performer, including in the 1956 production of Plain and Fancy. It was during a summer stock production of No, No, Nanette that she met her future Honeymooners co-star Meadows.
Randolph made the leap to television in the late 1940s, and she went on to guest star on shows like Rocky King, Detective and The Plainclothesman while also modeling and taking on spokesperson jobs. Her part in a Clorets breath mints commercial in 1951 caught Gleason’s attention, and he invited her to appear in a dramatic sketch on his variety show Cavalcade of Stars. The show also featured a six-minute segment titled “The Honeymooners” in December 1951 and had Gleason as Ralph Kramden, a short-tempered bus driver who kept trying to make his life better and Pert Kelton as his patient yet acerbic wife Alice. Carney played their dimwitted neighbor Ed Norton while actress Elaine Stritch was cast as Alice’s best friend and co-conspirator, Trixie Norton.
Everett Collection
That sketch, which Gleason wanted to be a realistic portrayal of a low-income couple living in Brooklyn, was such a hit that it became part of The Jackie Gleason Show, and Randolph was brought on to replace Stritch in the role of Trixie. Thanks to viewer response to the show, in large part to the sketch, it rivaled I Love Lucy as the most-watched show of its time. It was also said that the four main “Honeymooners” characters were the inspiration behind Fred and Wilma Flintstone and Barney and Betty Rubble of the 1960s animated classic series The Flintstones.
It was in October 1955 that The Honeymooners premiered as its own, half-hour series, filmed live in front of a studio audience, with Meadows replacing Kelton as Alice. While Randolph’s Trixie had the least amount of screentime, she had plenty of humorous and witty one-liners, including “Whoever said the Age of Chivalry is dead was right. I know the two guys that killed it.” She also had an intriguing back story about her past as a burlesque dancer, which was a reference to the original “Honeymooners” sketch. She earned considerably less than her co-stars ($500 per week), and in 2007, she said she received royalties from the “lost” episodes of the variety hour sketches but no residuals from her work on the show itself.
After that, Randolph appeared in one episode of the 1960s medical drama The Doctors and the Nurses and reprised her role of Trixie for Hi Honey, I’m Home in 1991. She returned to acting in 2000 as a dog walker in the film Everything’s Jake opposite Ernie Hudson, Debbie Allen, and Robin Givens.
Randolph married marketing executive Richard Lincoln Charles in 1955 and gave birth to their son five years later. Her husband died in 1997. She is survived by her son.
