Audrey Meadows

After high school, Audrey Meadows sang in the Broadway musical Top Banana before becoming a regular on television in The Bob and Ray Show. She was then hired to play Alice on The Jackie Gleason Show after the actress who originated the role, Pert Kelton, was forced to leave the show due to blacklisting, although the official reason given was that Kelton was suffering from a health problem. When The Honeymooners became a half-hour situation comedy on CBS, Meadows continued in the role. She then returned to play Alice after a long hiatus, when Gleason produced occasional Honeymooners specials in the 1970s. Meadows had auditioned for Gleason and was initially turned down for being too chic and pretty to play Alice. Meadows submitted a far different photo of herself, looking much plainer, the next day and won the role of Alice. The character of Alice became more associated with Meadows than with the others who played her, and she reprised her role as Alice on other shows, as well, both in a man-on-the-street interview for The Steve Allen Show and in a parody sketch on The Jack Benny Program.

Audrey Meadows was the only member of the Honeymooners cast to earn residuals after the “Classic 39” episodes of the show from 1955-56 started airing in reruns. Her brother Edward, a lawyer, had inserted a clause into her original contract whereby she would be paid if the shows were rebroadcast, thus earning her millions of dollars.  However, Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie Norton, did receive royalty payments when the “lost” Honeymooners episodes from the variety shows were later released. She appeared in a 1960 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, entitled “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat”, one of the 17 episodes in the 10-year series directed by Hitchcock himself. She appeared in feature films, appeared on Dean Martin’s television variety shows and celebrity roasts, and years later returned to situation comedy in the 1980s playing Ted Knight’s mother-in-law on Too Close for Comfort (1982–85). She guest-starred on The Red Skelton Show, made an appearance in an episode of Murder, She Wrote (“If the Frame Fits”), and made an appearance in an episode of The Simpsons (“Old Money”), wherein she voiced the role of Bea Simmons, Grandpa Simpson’s girlfriend. Her last work was an appearance on Dave’s World, in which she played the mother of Kenny (Shadoe Stevens).

In 1956, she married a wealthy real estate man named Randolph Rouse. On August 24, 1961, Meadows married her second husband, Robert F. “Bob” Six, president of Continental Airlines, in Honolulu, Hawaii. They remained married until Six’s death on October 6, 1986. She did not have any children through either marriage. Audrey Meadows never remarried. In 1995, Audrey Meadows was diagnosed with lung cancer and given a year to live. She declined all but palliative treatment. She died on February 3, 1996, at Cedars Sinai Hospital-Los Angeles after slipping into a coma, five days before her 74th birthday. She was interred in Holy Cross Cemetery, next to her husband.