Joyce Randolph, Last of the ‘Honeymooners,’ Is Dead at 99

Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie Norton, the wife of a guffawing, rubber-limbed sewer worker forever mired in a blowhard neighbor’s get-rich-quick schemes and other hazards of life on the classic 1950s sitcom “The Honeymooners,” died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 99.

Her son, Randy Charles, confirmed her death.

She was the last survivor of a cast of four that dominated the Saturday night viewing habits of millions in the golden age of live television, and for decades afterward on rerun broadcasts and home video. Jackie Gleason (Ralph Kramden) died in 1987; Audrey Meadows (Ralph’s wife, Alice) in 1996; and Art Carney (Ed Norton) in 2003.

In an age when status symbols in a gritty Brooklyn tenement were telephones, television sets and refrigerators, the Kramdens had none on a bus driver’s $62 a week. Reflecting America’s working-class experience, they struggled for a better life, shared disappointments and had fun, even if there was no uranium mine in Asbury Park and no market for glow-in-the-dark wallpaper, no-cal pizza or “KramMar’s Delicious Mystery Appetizer,” which turned out to be dog food.

As Trixie, Ms. Randolph played the upstairs wife who crossed her arms and commiserated with her best friend, Alice, over addlepated husbands who somehow got drunk on grape juice, found a suitcase of the mob’s counterfeit cash, invented a “handy” kitchen tool that could “core a apple” and, after waiting all year for the convention of their International Order of Friendly Raccoons, took the wrong train.

While her character was less developed than the others, Ms. Randolph was revered by aficionados as the last living link to the inspired lunacy of a show that had a cultlike following, with fan clubs, esoteric trivia contests and memorabilia sales. At a 1984 Long Island meeting of the Royal Association for the Longevity and Preservation of the Honeymooners, or RALPH, one could buy a size-52 bus driver’s uniform or a coveted Trixie apron.