Audrey Meadows, the Emmy Award winning actress who played one of television’s strongest and most spirited wives in the 1950s comedy “The Honeymooners,” has died of cancer in Los Angeles. She was 71.
Meadows, a heavy smoker, had been battling lung cancer the past year.
She managed to keep her illness hidden, even from her actress sister, Jayne Meadows. “She was so full of life just a month ago,” she told Variety.
“We thought she was in the hospital for treatment of a blood clot and phlebitis, but we learned she had concealed cancer [from us] for a year,” said Jayne Meadows, who stars on CBS’ “High Society” and is married to comedian Steve Allen.
Meadows died at 8:50 p.
m. Saturday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
She is remembered for the role of Alice Kramden, the wisecracking Brooklyn housewife who heard “threats” from her husband to send her “to the moon.
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“The Honeymooners,” Meadows once said, “was the best time I ever had, the best job I ever had, working with Jackie Gleason.
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“The Honeymooners” debuted as a skit on “The Jackie Gleason Show” and became a hit series on CBS in 1955.
That was the golden season the year that would make Gleason and Meadows, and co-stars Art Carney and Joyce Randolph, household names for decades to come.
Gleason played a lovable schemer who drove a bus and Meadows played his long-suffering, tough-as-nails wife.
A “Honeymooners” memoir by Meadows, “Love, Alice,” was published in 1994. At that time she said: “I loved that character of Alice, because she was strong and she was tender. She was everything that I think is fine in a woman.
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Gleason originally rejected Meadows as “too young and too pretty” for the role of his spouse.
But she said she went home, donned a frumpy housedress, lost the makeup, mussed up her hair and had a photographer shoot her picture. When Gleason saw the photos he hired her.
Meadows was born a missionary’s daughter in China. When she was 5 her family moved to California so the children could be educated in the United States.
She once dreamed of being an opera star. Instead, she got into musical comedy as a teenager, and eventually joined road tours of shows like “High Button Shoes” and performed bit parts in variety shows and commercials.
Meadows returned to television in 1977 for a series of “Honeymooners” reunions and went on to other roles, including a recurring part as Ted Knight’s mother-in-law on the 1980s sitcom “Too Close for Comfort.
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She was divorced once and widowed in 1986 when her husband of 25 years, Continental Airlines chief Bob Six, died.
Alice Kramden was widowed in 1987, when Gleason passed away. She would never again hear him say, “Baby, you’re the greatest.
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