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Waiting patiently while technicians scramble to prepare the next shot on the set of Family Law, Dixie Carter is amused. As Randi King, the tough attorney she plays on the CBS drama (Mondays, 10 P.M./ET), the actress usually find herself dealing with complicated cases in which human stakes are high. But the wrenching legal issue at hand has an odd twist.
"I'm representing a dog that's gotten too old," Carter explains with a big smile. Seems the client is the spokesdog for a potato chip company that wants to replace the mutt with a younger muzzle. "I love it," the Tennessee native continues. "I'm defending animals against ageism." The cameras roll, and Carter goes to work. One of her adversaries argues that the dog, at 9, is past his prime -- after all, that's 63 in human years. "Oooh, 63," Carter replies, dripping with sarcasm. "I'm amazed he hasn't just up and turned to dust!"
It's a funny scene, especially considering the subtext. The fact is, until recently, Carter -- who also has a recurring role on the CBS comedy Ladies Man, in which she plays Sharon Lawrence's manipulative mother, Peaches -- had to wonder if youth-obsessed network executives were thinking the same thing about her.
Despite starring in the popular CBS comedy Designing Women from 1986 to '93, Carter, who turned 60 in May, had found subsequent opportunities limited to such things as TV-movies and series guest spots. Undeterred, the actress interviewed for roles on two new shows last spring and got them both. Even more amazing is that both made it onto the fall schedule.
Sitting one morning in the hilltop Los Angeles home she shares with her husband, actor Hal Holbrook, her 80-year-old father, Halbert Carter (her mother died in 1987), and two dogs, the actress thinks she is in some pretty tall cotton these days. "God is good," Carter says. "Do you know the chances of getting in two big TV shows? As we say in Tennessee, the chances are two: slim and none. I'm telling you, I'm the latest of the late bloomers."
Actually, Carter's been doing pretty well over the last several years, TV or no TV. She's starred in an acclaimed Broadway play (as diva Maria Callas in Master Class), performed her Cabaret act across the country (she's a talented singer) and written a best-seller (her 1996 memoir-cum-self-help book, Trying to Get to Heaven). "There's a lot of different sides to Dixie," says Family Law star Kathleen Quinlan, who has known Carter more than 20 years. "She's a very well-rounded artist. And she's a great lady: gracious and very girlie-girl."
Adds Holbrook, 74, who's been married to Carter for 15 years: "She's extremely intelligent. She can come up with words that I forgot were even in the vocabulary. And she's very improvisational, which can drive you nuts sometimes. But it's an integral part of Dixie's charm." Indeed, an interview scheduled for an hour easily stretches into two and a half as Carter, casually chic in beige slacks ad a black top, regales her visitor with one colorful anecdote after another, reciting a poem by Yeats and employing words like 'inchoate.' Who cares if she occasionally veers off onto the scenic route when attempting to arrive at the answer to a question?
The second of three children, Carter grew up in McLemoresville, a tiny town located about 100 miles northeast of Memphis. Her father owned several small retail stores, and while hers "was not an artistic family or a family of letters," Carter recalls, "we grew up with a wonderfully refined way of looking at things." She dreamed of singing at the Metropolitan Opera but a botched tonsillectomy at 7 ended that ambition.
Though she "didn't have the chops" for opera, Carter sang in her college chorus, at parties and in beauty contests. She also studied classical music and plays the piano, trumpet and harmonica. After graduating from Memphis State with an English degree, she made her professional stage debut in a local production of Carousel in 1960. Three years later she moved to New York City and caught an early break when legendary theatrical producer Joseph Papp cast her in Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. But after marrying businessman Arthur Carter, now publisher of The New York Observer weekly newspaper, Carter left the stage for eight years to raise daughters Ginna, 29, an actress, and Mary Dixie, 27, a screenwriter.
When her marriage fell apart, Carter tried to return to acting but had a hard time finding an agent who would take her on at the ripe old age of 35. She finally landed a gig on the soap opera The Edge of Night and began to rebuild her career. When she was offered a role on the series On Our Own in 1977, she uprooted her kids and headed for L.A. (a second marriage, to Broadway actor George Hearn in 1978, quickly ended in divorce.)
Unfortunately for her, the CBS comedy was short-lived, and after a tough few years Carter was ready to move back to New York. But Holbrook, whom she met in 1980 while working on the TV-movie The Killing of Randy Webster, encouraged her to stick it out. The following year she was cast in the CBS comedy Filthy Rich. The series lasted only one season, but it introduced her to producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. "She said, 'Dixie, this is not the end of us,'" Carter recalls. "'I'm going to write a more mainstream part for you and introduce you to America.'" That part turned out to be Julia Sugarbaker, the classy-but-brassy steel magnolia on Designing Women that made Carter a star at 47.
"It was so clearly a match made in heaven," says Carter, who maintains that mishandling by the network and producers caused the show, which also starred Delta Burke, Annie Potts, and Jean Smart, to be canceled too soon. "I want to keep everything real pleasant, and Julia would go out there and let people have it. It was fun for me." The feud between Burke and Bloodworth-Thomason, however, was anything but fun. After Carter -- who was Burke's matron of honor when she wed actor Gerald McRaney -- publicly defended the producer, Burke attacked her costar in the press as a liar. The rift continues to this day.
Randi King, Carter's character on Family Law, is far removed from the world of Designing Women, and that suits the actress just fine. "She isn't the genteel woman that Julia Sugarbaker was," Carter observes of her new TV alter ego, a clever survivor who was tried for killing her husband, studied law in prison and got the conviction reversed when she proved self-defense. "It's great for me to play." She also loves the fact that the producers have cooked up a romance between Randi and her legal assistant (Christian de la Fuente), a handsome man some 30 years her junior.
"I took it as a high compliment that they saw me as a sexual entity," the actress says. Family Law co-creator Paul Haggis (Due South) had no doubt that Carter could pull it off. "Obviously, she's beautiful," he says. "And she has a bearing that makes you accept some of the outrageous things that come out of her mouth." She also works at it. "I don't think any performer is going to last without some kind of animal appeal."
"I think that life is about staying ahead of the hounds. I want to be in the mix forever and ever and ever."
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