Audrey Meadows

Meadows was born Audrey Cotter in New York City in 1922, the youngest of four siblings. There is considerable debate and confusion concerning her year of birth and place of birth. Some biographies state that she was born in 1922 in New York City. Other biographies place her birth in 1926 in WuChang, China. Her parents, the Rev. Francis James Meadows Cotter and his wife, the former Ida Miller Taylor, had been Episcopal missionaries in Wuchang, Hubei, 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.\n', '

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 ac…