Actress Dixie Carter dies at 70

LOS ANGELES — I never watched the show but I did see Carter one night onLate Night With David Letterman. She was very funny. Dixie Carter, the “Designing Women” star who used her Southern charm, quick wit and stately beauty in a host of roles on Broadway and television, died Saturday. She was 70.

Publicist Steve Rohr, who represents Carter and her husband, actor Hal Holbrook, said Carter died Saturday morning. He would not disclose where she died or the cause of death. Carter and Holbrook lived in the Los Angeles area.

“This has been a terrible blow to our family,” Holbrook said in a written statement. “We would appreciate everyone understanding that this is a private family tragedy.”

A native of Tennessee, Carter was most famous for playing wisecracking Southerner Julia Sugarbaker for seven years on “Designing Women,” the CBS sitcom that ran from 1986 to 1993. The series was the peak of a career in which she often played wealthy and self-important but independent Southern women.

She was nominated for an Emmy in 2007 for her seven-episode guest stint on the ABC hit “Desperate Housewives.”

Carter’s other credits include roles on the series “Family Law” and “Different Strokes.”

She married Holbrook in 1984. The two had met four years earlier while making the TV movie “The Killing of Randy Webster,” and although attracted to one another, each had suffered two failed marriages and were wary at first.

They finally wed two years before Carter landed her role on “Designing Women.” Holbrook appeared on the show regularly in the late
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1980 s as her boyfriend, Reese Watson.