LOS ANGELES — Jane Kean, a diverse performer who got her start in musical theater but was best known as Trixie alongside Jackie Gleason on a TV revival of "The Honeymooners," has died. She was 90.
Kean, of Toluca Lake, died Tuesday at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank where she was taken after a fall that led to a hemorrhagic stroke, her niece, Deirdre Wolpert, said Thursday.
Kean first started working with Jackie Gleason in the 1940s, when they were both on the vaudeville circuit.
Her big break, however, came in 1966 when Gleason and CBS revived the hit show "The Honeymooners" in Miami Beach, expanding it to an hour and adding musical numbers.
Kean, a talented singer with a belting voice, starred on the show for five years as Ed Norton's beleaguered wife Trixie.
She often spoke about those years and her chance to appear on such a well-known program with Gleason, Wolpert said.
"One day she picked up the phone and he said, 'Are you doing anything right now?' and she said 'No' and he said 'Come on down and be Trixie,'" Wolpert said of Gleason. "Two weeks later she was on the plane to Florida."
Born in Hartford, Conn., on April 10, 1923, Kean got into show business at an early age along with her sister, Betty, with the encouragement of her mother.
She headlined at the London Palladium before making her debut in a 1943 Broadway production of the Fats Waller musical "Early to Bed."
She eventually moved to Los Angeles and appeared in some films for MGM before forming a comedy act in the 1950s with her sister, who is Wolpert's mother. The all-female comedy team, a rarity at the time, played night clubs and rubbed shoulders with comedians like Milton Berle.
The sisterly duo also performed in a comedy called "Ankles Aweigh" on Broadway in 1955.
After jumping to TV, Kean stayed on "The Honeymooners" for five years before leaving to pursue other avenues, including guest appearances, performing in Las Vegas and doing voice work. In 1977, she worked on the children's movie "Pete's Dragon" — behind-the-scenes work that the usually glamorous actress joked she didn't like because she didn't need to wear make-up, her niece said. Most recently, she provided the voice of Aunt Ida in the new children's film "Abner the Pig," said her publicist Alan Eichler.
Last year, Kean put on a one-woman show that was a retrospective of her life's work. She performed it again at Hollywood's Pantages Theatre just months ago and had plans to travel to London after Christmas with her niece. She was also preparing invitations for her annual Christmas party in the days before her death, Wolpert said.
"This was a really kicking 90-year-old. The number of friends that she had, the people who loved her ... she had a wonderful life and a wonderful career," she said.
"She was a glamour girl, but she also had a lot of substance."
In addition to Wolpert, Kean is survived by Wolpert's husband and two children and a stepson from her second marriage, Joseph Hecht Jr., and his family.
Her sister Betty Kean died in 1986. Her second husband, her manager Joe Hecht, died in 2006.
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Follow Gillian Flaccus on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/gflaccus
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