Profile of Delta Burke on Famous Like Me

Delta Ramona Leah Burke (born July 30, 1956 in Orlando, Florida) is an American television and film actress. She is probably best known for her role as Suzanne Sugarbaker in the sitcom Designing Women.

After graduating from Colonial High School in Orlando, she won the Miss Florida title for 1973. Burke was paired with Georgia, Gail Nelson, in the Miss America pageant in 1974, and won a talent scholarship allowing her to attend a two-year study program at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. She is a designer and manager of the clothing company Delta Burke Design in New York City. Delta has been married to actor Gerald McRaney since 1989.

Ever since the early 1990s, Delta's weight has been a subject of discussion in the tabloid press. In reality, her struggles with weight and eating disorders stretch back to her pageant days in the early 1970s. She was fired from Designing Women when relations between Burke and her co-stars, especially Dixie Carter, deteriorated. Speculation in the press labeled the reason for her firing to be her weight gain.

Delta went on to star in her own television show, Delta, and in Women of the House (reprising her Suzanne Sugarbaker role without the other Designing Women actresses).

In the early 2000s, she co-starred with David Alan Grier on the sitcom DAG; she had lost much of her excess weight for the role after being diagnosed with diabetes.

Selected Filmography

• Good Boy! (2003)
• Going for Broke (2003)
• What Women Want (2000)
• Melanie Darrow (1997)
• Women of the House (1995)
• Delta (1992)
• Designing Women (1986)
• Filthy Rich (1982)

Nonfiction

• Delta Style: Eve Wasn't a Size 6 and Neither Am I (1998, St. Martin's Press ;ISBN 0312154542 )

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