Audrey Meadows

Audrey Meadows (February 8, 1922 – February 3, 1996) was an American actress best known for her role as the deadpan housewife Alice Kramden on the 1950s American television comedy The Honeymooners.

Early life

Born as Audrey Cotter in New York City in 1922, the youngest of four siblings. Her parents, the Rev. Francis James Meadows Cotter and his wife, the former Ida Miller Taylor, had been Episcopal missionaries in Wu-ch'ang, China, where her three elder siblings were born. The family returned to live in New York in 1921. Her older sister was actress Jayne Meadows. She attended high school at the Barrington School for Girls in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

Career

After high school, she 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.

Meadows was the only member of the Honeymooners cast to earn residuals after the show started airing in re-runs. Her lawyers, who were also her brothers, successfully argued in court that she was entitled to them, earning her millions of dollars. None of the shows other cast members, however, reported any ill-will or bad feelings towards her for doing so.

Career outside The Honeymooners

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 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).

Personal life

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; both of her marriages were childless. Meadows never remarried.

Banking and marketing career

Meadows served as director of the First National Bank of Denver for eleven years, the first woman to hold this position. From 1961–1981 she was an advisory director of Continental Airlines, where she was actively involved in marketing programs that included the designs of flight attendant and customer service agent uniforms, aircraft interiors, and Continental's exclusive "President's Club" airport club lounges.

Memoirs

In October 1994, Meadows published her memoirs, Love, Alice: My Life As A Honeymooner.

Illness and death

In 1995, 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.