Just got the bulletin about the passing away yesterday of Joyce Randolph (Joyce Serola, b. 1924), best known as the actress who played Trixie on The Honeymooners, both as a series of sketches on The Jackie Gleason Show (1952-57) and as a stand-alone sitcom (1955-56).
Randolph was one of the oldest and more eminent members of The Lambs Club, so I’ve caught many a glimpse of her in photos with my good chums over the past 10, 15 years. I’d heard she’d gone into hospice a few months ago, so this day doesn’t come as a major shock. If only she’d hung on until October this would have been a centennial post like the one I just did on the late Guy Williams.
Being cast as Trixie so early in her career was both good and bad luck for Randolph. Good luck, of course, because it made her famous, even if she was the least comical of the show’s quartet by a country mile. Bad luck because she did very little before or after her time in the role. Gleason had hired her early in her career. She had been in a road company of Stage Door, and appeared in Ladies Night in a Turkish Bath (1950) on Broadway. Gleason had spotted her in a Clorets commercial. Then, after the show wrapped no one would hire her because everyone identified her with Trixie. She didn’t participate in later Honeymooners incarnations because Gleason taped them in Miami, and she lived in New York. Jane Kean played Trixie in those later shows.
Randolph kept a hand in by performing in summer stock and the like. At the time of her death it had been 67 years since she had played Trixie, and over 20 years since her last surviving co-star Art Carney (who played her tv husband Ed Norton) passed.
