Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 23, 1994 TAG: 9404230070
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JAMES ENDRST THE HARTFORD COURANT
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
That's the first thing you notice about Dixie Carter: She's an old-fashioned lady, and proud of it.
An actress best known to TV audiences for her seven-year run as the opinionated, speechifying Julia Sugarbaker on "Designing Women," the Tennessee native is currently doing her cabaret act at the pish-posh Cafe Carlyle in Manhattan (through April 23).
"I wish I could make a living at it," says Carter in her throaty but delicate Southern drawl. "When I can make a living at singing, I don't know, maybe I won't do anything else. And it looks like I'm heading that way."
Well, maybe not quite yet.
Carter, 53, has a variety of projects in the works, including several made-for-TV movies.
In the first, "A Perry Mason Mystery: The Case of the Lethal Lifestyle" (due May 10 on NBC), Carter stars opposite her actor-husband and "Designing Women" alumnus Hal Holbrook.
In Kenny Rogers upcoming CBS miniseries "Gambler V: Playing for Keeps" (tentatively scheduled for May) she plays the part of Lillie Langtry.
"I felt very shy meeting Kenny Rogers and singing in that production, which I did - to him - from the stage of the Galveston (Texas) opera house," she says.
"He's great," she goes on. "His musicianship is stunning. He's just a natural performer. He's not capable of having a false moment in his acting or his singing."
Carter doesn't seem to have many false moments either, though some might find her Southern-belle manners hard to fathom in this day and age.
"I'm really interested in femininity," she says without apologies. "I like being a woman. I like being like a woman. I enjoy projecting that. I think it's perfectly all right to want to be attractive to men."
It's Holbrook, though, who really gives her the romantic vapors.
"He left me a letter, which I found this morning (after he flew out of New York)," she says. "Of which one sentence read: `I am in love with you, Dixie.'
"That was a sentence in his letter. You can't beat that with a stick," she says, her eyes welling up with tears.
"You know if somebody feels like that about you, then what can the Hollywood moguls really do to you?"
After her tumultuous behind-the-scenes experiences on the set of "Designing Women" with Delta Burke and producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, Carter knows full well how tough show business can be.
But being a lady, she doesn't like to talk out of school about it.
"Last night I heard a joke about `Designing Women' on `Hearts Afire,' " Carter says, mentioning Bloodworth-Thomason's current CBS show.
But she won't repeat the line (which obviously stung her) because, she says, "It has a couple of words I don't use."
Carter, however, has few regrets about her years on the show.
"It's a wonderful thing about the human mind. The bad things get more and more dim," she says, mentioning that she feels the same way about her first two marriages.
"I'm trying to compose a letter to Linda Bloodworth-Thomason thanking her for that part," she says, "for the fact that people now come to me and thank me for something that had to do with watching that show. Thank me. . . . Whatever else went on in the show - that I'd sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and just pray it was a dream - it's over now, and overall I have a wonderful feeling about having done the show."
Small wonder, then, that Carter isn't too upset that her next CBS sitcom, "Her Honor," in which she stars as a judge, probably won't get on until mid-season of 1994-95 at the earliest.
"I'd like to have a little more time before I get back to that schedule," she says. "I got talked into jumping up and doing this a year before I would have anyway. So I was disappointed that (CBS asked) for another rewrite, and we weren't in time for the fall lineup. On the other hand, I'm sure it's a blessing in disguise. I just feel like nothing's wasted - no time is wasted - if you're not just sitting still watching TV."
Say again?
Oh, yes, says Carter, "I'm such a critic of television. I do bite the hand that feeds me a lot because it needs to be bitten."
Carter has other interests - a second Yoga-based fitness video, a follow-up to her "Dixie Carter's Unworkout" tape, which went platinum; another TV miniseries, Judith Krantz's "Dazzle," due this fall on CBS; and she is hoping to produce a movie based on a real-life "gentlemen bandit" starring Holbrook.
by CNB