Audrey Meadows

Audrey Meadows (born Audrey Cotter; February 8, 1922 – February 3, 1996) was an American actress who portrayed the deadpan housewife Alice Kramden on the 1950s American television comedy The Honeymooners. She was the younger sister of Hollywood leading lady Jayne Meadows.

Meadows was born Audrey Cotter in New York City in 1922, the youngest of four siblings. There was considerable confusion concerning her year of birth and place of birth for many years.

Her parents, the Reverend Francis James Meadows Cotter and his wife, the former Ida Miller Taylor, were Episcopal missionaries in Wuchang, China, where her three elder siblings were born. Her older sister was actress Jayne Meadows, and she had two older brothers. The family returned permanently to the United States in 1927. Audrey attended high school at the Barrington School for Girls in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Moving to New York City to pursue her career, Audrey became a resident in the famed Rehearsal Club along with other aspiring actresses.

After high school, 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 (who was 9 years older than Gleason), was forced to leave the show due to blacklisting (but the official reason given was that Kelton was suffering from a health problem).

When The Honeymooners became a half-hour sitcom, Meadows (who was six years younger than Gleason) 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 rejected for being too chic and pretty to play Alice. Realizing that she needed to change her appearance, Meadows the next day submitted a photo of herself, one in which she looked much plainer. Gleason changed his mind, and she 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 (Steve Allen was her brother-in-law) and in a parody sketch on The Jack Benny Program.

Meadows was the only member of the Honeymooners cast to earn residual royalties after the "Classic 39" episodes of the show from 1955 to 1956 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 re-broadcast, thus earning her millions of dollars. When the "lost" Honeymooners episodes from the variety shows were released, Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie Norton, received royalty payments.

For her work on the show, Meadows was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (then for "In a Regular Series") at the 8th Primetime Emmy Awards. She lost to Nanette Fabray in Caesar's Hour.

Meadows appeared in a 1960 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents titled "Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat", one of the 17 episodes in the 10-year series directed by Hitchcock, and a rare light-hearted one.