Profile of Dixie Carter on Famous Like Me

This article is about the actress. For the businesswoman, please see Dixie Carter (TNA).

Dixie Virginia Carter (born May 25, 1939) is an American actress noted for her portrayal of Southern women.

Carter was born in tiny McLemoresville, Tennessee and spent many of her early years in Memphis. She attended college at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College). She is a graduate of Memphis State (now University of Memphis) with a degree in English.

In 1960, Carter made her professional stage debut in a Memphis production of Carousel (musical). She moved to New York in 1963 and got a part in a production of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. In 1967 she married businessman Arthur Carter, with whom she had two daughters, Mary Dixie and Ginna, who appeared in an episode of Designing Women back in the 1990s. Following the birth of her daughters, she left acting for eight years to focus on raising her children. She returned to acting at age 35. In 1974, she filled in for actress Nancy Pinkerton as 'Dorian Cramer Lord' on One Life to Live, while Pinkerton was on maternity leave. She divorced Arthur Carter in 1977, and married Broadway and TV actor George Hearn the same year. Two years later, in 1979, she divorced Hearn and married again 5 years later, on May 27, 1984, to the somewhat older actor Hal Holbrook, who is most noted for his appearances as Mark Twain. Carter and Holbrook live in liberal-minded Beverly Hills with Carter's elderly father, but they frequently pay visits to Tennessee.

Carter first became famous for her role as 'Assistant D.A. Brandy Henderson' on the soap opera The Edge of Night. She also appeared in series such as Out of the Blue, On Our Own, Different Strokes, and Filthy Rich (1982). However, she is best known for appearing as outspoken liberal activist Julia Sugarbaker in the 1980s/1990s television program Designing Women, set in Atlanta, Georgia, which was a big stretch ideologically for Carter (see below). From 1999 to 2002, she portrayed brash Southern attorney Randi King on the legal drama series Family Law. She also starred in several Broadway musicals and plays, including portraying the late opera singer and diva Maria Callas in Callas, for which she very effectively lost her regional accent. This was the play that fellow Southerner Faye Dunaway mortgaged her home to buy the rights to make the film version in which she planned to play Callas herself, but it never came to pass.

She is known for her Southern pride, which is evident in her product endorsements, like her appearances in commercials for Southern Bell (later BellSouth).

Carter is also a registered Republican, who was interviewed by Bill O'Reilly along with Pat Boone at the 2000 Republican National Convention. She once jokingly described herself as "the only Republican in show business."

In 1996, Carter published her memoirs, entitled Trying to Get to Heaven.

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