1. Audrey Meadows was the younger sister of Hollywood leading lady Jayne Meadows.
18 Facts About Audrey Meadows
2.
Audrey Meadows 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.
3.
Audrey Meadows then returned to play Alice after a long hiatus, when Gleason produced occasional Honeymooners specials in the 1970s.
4.
Audrey Meadows had auditioned for Gleason and was initially rejected for being too chic and pretty to play Alice.
5.
Audrey 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.
6.
Audrey 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 himself, and a rare light-hearted one.
7.
Audrey Meadows appeared in feature films and on Dean Martin's television variety shows and celebrity roasts.
8.
Audrey Meadows starred in an episode of Wagon Train in the episode's titled role of Nancy Palmer.
9.
Years later Audrey Meadows returned to situation comedy, playing Ted Knight's mother-in-law in Too Close for Comfort.
10.
Audrey Meadows guest-starred on The Red Skelton Show, made an appearance in an episode of Murder, Audrey Meadows Wrote, and made an appearance in an episode of The Simpsons, wherein she voiced the role of Bea Simmons, Grampa Simpson's girlfriend.
11.
Audrey Meadows's last work was an appearance on Dave's World, in which she played the mother of Kenny.
12.
In total, Audrey Meadows earned four Primetime Emmy nominations for her television work, winning one for The Jackie Gleason Show.
13.
In 1956, Audrey Meadows married Randolph Rouse, a wealthy real-estate businessman.
14.
Audrey Meadows served as director of the First National Bank of Denver for 11 years, the first woman to hold the position.
15.
In October 1994, Audrey Meadows published her memoirs, Love, Alice: My Life As A Honeymooner.
16.
Audrey Meadows declined all but palliative treatment and died on February 3,1996, five days before her 74th birthday, after she slipped into a coma at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
17.
Audrey Meadows was interred in Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City, next to her second husband.
18.
Audrey Meadows was portrayed by Kristen Dalton in Gleason, a 2002 television biographical film about the life of her Honeymooners co-star Jackie Gleason.