Dixie Carter - Career

Career

In 1960, Carter made her professional stage debut in a Memphis production of Carousel. 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 returned to the craft in 1974, when she filled in for actress Nancy Pinkerton as Dorian Cramer on One Life to Live, while Pinkerton was on maternity leave. She subsequently was cast in the role of Assistant D.A. Olivia Brandeis "Brandy" Henderson on the soap opera The Edge of Night, on which she appeared from 1974 to 1976. (She went along with the show when it switched from CBS to ABC.) Carter took the role even though some advised her that doing a daytime soap might negatively affect her career. However, it was with this role that Carter was first noticed, and after leaving Edge of Night in 1976, she relocated from New York to Los Angeles and pursued prime-time television roles.

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), The Greatest American Hero (playing a KGB spy), and as the snooty 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, Georgia. Filthy Rich was created by Linda Bloodworth Thomason, who also went on to create 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 cast-mates Delta Burke, Annie Potts, and Jean Smart. Filthy Rich also featured fellow Designing Women cast member Delta Burke in its cast.) After many 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.

Coincidentally, actress Mary Ann Mobley who replaced Dixie as Maggie on Diff'rent Strokes, guest starred on Designing Women, as Karen, a snide head of a historical society who put Julia's home on a tour of homes, and ended up angering Julia.

Famous for portraying strong-minded Southern women, Carter provided the voice of Necile in Mike Young Productions' direct-to-video 2000 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 My Neighbors the Yamadas.

From 1999 to 2002, she portrayed Randi King on the legal drama Family Law, portraying a lawyer for the first time since she played Brandy Henderson on The Edge of Night. In 2004, she made a guest appearance on Law and Order: SVU, 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.

Carter starred in several Broadway musicals and plays. She appeared on and off-Broadway as well, playing the role of Melba Snyder in the 1976 Circle in the Square revival of Pal Joey and diva Maria Callas in Terrence McNally's Master Class, a role created by Zoe Caldwell.

In 2006–07 Carter found a resurgence of fame with a new generation of fans portraying the disturbed Gloria Hodge on Desperate Housewives. Creator Marc Cherry started out 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 co-workers, 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 on site with her husband Hal Holbrook in East Tennessee in the summer of 2008. The film was produced by Dogwood Entertainment (a subsidiary of DoubleJay Creative) and 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.