Dixie Carter, 1939–2010

As the star of the CBS sitcom Designing Women, Dixie Carter struck a deal with the show’s liberal creators, Clinton stalwarts Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. Each time Carter’s character, interior designer Julia Sugarbaker, took a liberal stand that clashed with Carter’s own conservative orientation, Carter was allowed to indulge her love of singing on the show. It was a fitting compromise for a woman who as a child had dreamed of performing opera and who later enjoyed a career in cabaret.

Born in McLemoresville, Tenn., Dixie Virginia Carter studied singing and learned piano, trumpet, and harmonica when she was a young girl, said Variety. After graduating from Memphis State University, she made her stage debut in a 1960 Memphis production of Carousel. Three years later, in New York, she joined a Joseph Papp production of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. She would go on to forge a career “in which she often played wealthy and self-important but independent Southern women.”

Carter “gave up acting when she married investment banker Arthur Carter in 1967,” said the Los Angeles Times. The hiatus lasted about a decade, as she raised two daughters, and she restarted her career on TV’s The Edge of Night. After she and Carter divorced, in 1977, she was briefly married to actor George Hearn. In 1984 she married actor Hal Holbrook, who survives her.

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In addition to Designing Women, which aired from 1986 to 1993, Carter had parts in Diff’rent Strokes, Family Law, and Filthy Rich, and was nominated for an Emmy for her role as a venomous mother-in-law on Desperate Housewives. But singing remained her first love. “To me, there’s no feeling as gorgeous as the feeling of singing,” she said. “It’s like flying.”