(In an engaging, often humorous memoir written in collabor...)
In an engaging, often humorous memoir written in collaboration with novelist Joe Daley, the Emmy-winning actress recalls her years playing Alice Kramden opposite the inimitable Jackie Gleason on one of the most popular TV series of all time, The Honeymooners.
Audrey Meadows was an American actress. She is best known for her role as Alice Kramden, the long-suffering wife of New York City bus driver Ralph Kramden, played by Jackie Gleason, on the classic television series ‘The Honeymooners’.
Background
Audrey Meadows was born as Audrey Cotter in New York City, New York, United States about 1922-1924. According to some sources, the place of her birth was Wuchang, Hubei, China where her parents, the Reverend Francis James Meadows Cotter, and Ida Miller Cotter (maiden name Taylor) were on an Episcopal mission.
Meadows had three elder siblings, two brothers named George E. Cotter and Francis Taylor Cotter, and a sister Jayne Meadows. Jayne was also an actress mostly known as Jayne Meadows-Allen.
Education
Audrey Meadows studied in Barrington High School in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. She was also trained as a singer at a private school in Massachusetts.
She planned to pursue her education at Smith College but the plans were abandoned at the behest of her sister, Jayne, and they began to make their way to New York City casting offices.
Audrey Meadows started her career at the age of sixteen when she made her debut in New York’s prestigious Carnegie Hall as a coloratura soprano. Soon, Meadows found work singing in light operas and toured with the road company of High Button Shoes for two years as well as with the USO during World War II.
In 1951, she began to earn comedic roles, playing all the female parts on television’s ‘Bob and Ray Show’ and opposite Phil Silvers in ‘Top Banana’ on Broadway. A year later, she convinced an initially skeptical Jackie Gleason, who thought her too young and beautiful for the part, to hire her to play the sharp-tongued but dignified Alice opposite his Ralph in brief sketches on ‘The Jackie Gleason Show’. In 1955 the sketches were expanded to a half-hour situation comedy series called The Honeymooners.
After her role as Alice Kramden ended in the early 1960s, the actress took occasional work in television, and in movies, but found herself essentially typecast as a housewife. At the begging of the decade, she turned in one episode of ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ called ‘Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat’.
Later, Meadows participated in Dean Martin's TV shows, as a guest star in The Red Skelton Show, and was featured in the episodes of Wagon Train and Too Close for Comfort TV series. In addition to occasional guest appearances on television variety and game shows, specials, situation comedies, and dramas, Meadows also made voice-over for Bea Simmons, one of the characters of the animated sitcom The Simpsons.
From 1961 to 1981, Audrey Meadows served as a director on Advisory board of Continental Airlines. While on the post, she took an active part in the marketing activity of the company. Later, from 1977 to 1996, she headed the First National Bank of Denver.
In 1994, the actress published her autobiography written with a family friend and novelist Joe Daley. The volume focused on her years working with Gleason, the creator of The Honeymooners, and was viewed by some as a response to two 1992 biographies of the comedian, which had portrayed him as something of a tyrant.
Audrey Meadows’s reputation as Jackie Gleason’s television wife in the Honeymooners earned her lasting admiration from loyal fans, who continued to write a great number of letters and to request autographs in the decades after the actress had essentially retired from show business.
Being nominated for Emmy Award three times, she received it in 1955 as Outstanding Supporting Actress in a regular series. Meadows’s contributions to the movie industry were also marked by Sylvania Award from the television manufacturer Sylvania Electric Products.
In 1990, Audrey Meadows was inducted into the Broadcasting Hall of Fame of the National Association of Broadcasters for her role in The Honeymooners.
Actress Kristen Dalton played Meadows in 2002 television biopic Gleason focused on the life of another Honeymooners star Jackie Gleason.
(In an engaging, often humorous memoir written in collabor...)
1994
Politics
Audrey Meadows was a strong supporter of the Republican Party.
Views
Quotations:
"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."
"I've always voted Republican because America is exactly that, a republic."
Membership
Audrey Meadows was an honorary trustee of the Pearl Buck Foundation, and a member of Hollywood Park Racing Charities Association.
Connections
Audrey Meadows was married twice. In 1956, the actress formed a family with a rich real estate man Randolph Rouse. They broke up two years later.
The brief marriage was followed on August 24, 1961, by a much longer union with Robert Six, the president of Continental Airlines, which lasted for twenty-five years, until Six’s death in 1986.
