Dixie Carter

Dixie Virginia Carter was born May 25, 1939, to Esther Virginia (née Hillsman) and Halbert Leroy Carter in McLemoresville, Tennessee. Carter spent many of her early years in Memphis. She attended the University of Memphis and Rhodes College. In college, she was a member of the Delta Delta Delta sorority. In 1959, Carter competed in the Miss Tennessee pageant, where she placed first runner-up to Mickie Weyland. Carter won the Miss Volunteer beauty pageant at the University of Tennessee the same year. ==Career==

In 1960, Carter made her professional stage debut in a Memphis production of Carousel, co-starring George Hearn, whom she would go on to marry 17 years later. She moved to New York City in 1963 and got a part in a production of Shakespeare's ''The Winter's Tale''. In 1967, she began an eight-year hiatus from acting, to focus on raising her two daughters; She appeared in series such as Out of the Blue (as Aunt Marion), On Our Own (as April Baxter), ''Diff'rent Strokes'' (as the first Maggie McKinney Drummond, Phillip Drummond's second wife), The Greatest American Hero (playing a KGB spy) and as the stuck up and conniving Carlotta Beck on Filthy Rich (1982). Carter's appearance in Filthy Rich paved the way for her most notable role, that of sharp tongued liberal interior decorator Julia Sugarbaker in the 1986–1993 television program Designing Women, set in Atlanta. Filthy Rich was created by Linda Bloodworth Thomason, who also created Designing Women. (In the beginning, without knowing the content of the show, Bloodworth-Thomason's only idea was to create a show starring Carter and fellow castmates Delta Burke, Annie Potts and Jean Smart. Filthy Rich also featured fellow Designing Women cast member Delta Burke in its cast.) After much persuasion from creators Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and her husband Harry Thomason, Hal Holbrook, Carter's real-life husband, had a recurring role as attorney Reese Watson. Carter's daughters Ginna and Mary Dixie Carter also had guest star roles as Julia Sugarbaker's nieces Jennifer and Camilla in the episode "The Naked Truth" in 1989. In 1997, Carter starred as Maria Callas in Terrence McNally's play Master Class. She played the role from January to June. The role previously had been played by Zoe Caldwell and Patti LuPone. Noted for portraying strong-minded Southern women, Carter provided the voice of Necile in Mike Young Productions' cartoon feature The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. She was also in the voice cast of My Neighbors the Yamadas, the English language dub of Studio Ghibli's 1999 anime movie of the same. From 1999 to 2002, she portrayed Randi King on the legal drama Family Law. From 1999 to 2000, she was a cast member on the short-lived sitcom Ladies Man, appearing as a regular on both Ladies Man and Family Law. In 2004, she made a guest appearance on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, playing a defense attorney named Denise Brockmorton in the episode called "Home", in which she defended the paranoid mother of two children (Diane Venora) who had manipulated her older son to kill the younger son after breaking her home rules. In 2006–2007, Carter found a resurgence of fame with a new generation of fans portraying Gloria Hodge, Bree Van de Kamp's disturbed (and scheming) mother-in-law on Desperate Housewives. Creator Marc Cherry started in Hollywood as Carter's assistant on the set of Designing Women. Her first and only Emmy Awards nomination was for the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards under the category of Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Gloria Hodge. Carter gave an interview in 2006 for the feature-length documentary That Guy: The Legacy of Dub Taylor, which received support from Taylor's family and many of Dub's previous coworkers, including Bill Cosby, Peter Fonda, Don Collier, Cheryl Rogers-Barnett and many others. The project was scheduled to have its world premiere at Taylor's childhood hometown of Augusta, Georgia on April 14, 2007. Her final film was That Evening Sun, which she filmed with her husband Hal Holbrook in East Tennessee in summer 2008. The film, produced by Dogwood Entertainment (a subsidiary of DoubleJay Creative), is based on a short story by William Gay. That Evening Sun premiered at South By Southwest, where it competed for the narrative feature grand jury prize. ==Personal life==

In 1967, Carter married Arthur Carter (no relation), businessman and publisher of the New York Observer. Following the birth of their daughters –Mary Dixie (1970) and Ginna (1970)– Carter left acting for eight years to raise the girls with Arthur's three children, Jon, Whendy and Ellen Carter. She divorced Arthur Carter in 1977 and married theater and TV actor George Hearn the same year. Two years later, she and Hearn divorced. She married Hal Holbrook in 1984. In 1996, Carter published a memoir titled Trying to Get to Heaven, in which she talked frankly about her life with Holbrook, Designing Women and her plastic surgery during the show's run. She acknowledged, along with other celebrities, having used human growth hormone for its antiaging properties. Carter was a lifelong Methodist and a member of the McLemoresville United Methodist Church. Political views Carter was a registered Republican who described her political views as libertarian. She was interviewed by Bill O'Reilly along with Pat Boone at the 2000 Republican National Convention, and once jokingly described herself as "the only Republican in show business". However, Carter's Designing Women character, Julia Sugarbaker, was known for her liberal political views and related speeches, for which she was nicknamed "The Terminator." Carter disagreed with some of her character's beliefs, and made a deal with the show's producers that if Julia delivered a "Terminator" monologue, she would get to sing a song in a future episode. In later years she was also a libertarian Republican who supported civil rights and same-sex marriage. ==Death and legacy==

On April 10, 2010, Carter died in Houston, at the age of 70, from complications of endometrial cancer. She was interred in McLemoresville, Tennessee. The Dixie Carter Performing Arts and Academic Enrichment Center (informally called "The Dixie") in Huntingdon, Tennessee, is named in honor of Carter. A public service announcement made by Carter in 2003 describing and offering outreach to people with spasmodic torticollis/cervical dystonia began appearing in New York and New Jersey and then across the United States in 2010. ==Filmography==

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