'Designing Women' star Dixie Carter dies

 "Designing Women" star Dixie Carter, whose Southern charm and natural beauty led to dozens of roles on the screen and stage, died on Saturday in Houston of complications of endometrial cancer.. She was 70.

 Husband and fellow actor Hal Holbrook called a "terrible blow" for their family.
The Tennessee native, with her unmistakable Southern accent and style, was a Broadway veteran before she landed a series of high-profile television roles that made her a national star.
She found perhaps her perfect part in Julia Sugarbaker, the wiser and wittier half of a pair of sisters who ran an Atlanta interior decorating firm in "Designing Women." The CBS sitcom that had a seven-year run on the network and an endless life in reruns.
 Carter lived with Holbrook 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 "Diff'rent 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 1980s as her boyfriend, Reese Watson.
The two appeared together in her final project, the 2009 independent film "That Evening Sun," shot in Tennessee and based on a short story by Southern novelist William Gay.
The middle of three children, Carter was born in 1939 in McLemoresville, Tenn.
Carter was the daughter of a grocery and department store owner who died just three years ago at 96. She said at the time of his death that he taught her to believe in people's essential goodness.
"When I asked him how he handled shoplifting in his new store, which had a lot of goods on display, making it impossible to keep an eye on everything, he said, 'Most people are honest, and if they weren't, you couldn't stay in business because a thief will find a way to steal,'" Carter said. "'You can't really protect yourself, but papa and I built our business believing most people are honest and want to do right by you.'"
Carter grew up in Carroll County and made her stage debut in a 1960 production of "Carousel" in Memphis. It was the beginning of a decades-long stage career in which she relied on her singing voice as much as her acting.
She appeared in TV soap operas in the 1970s, but did not become a national star until her recurring roles on "Diff'rent Strokes" and another series, "Filthy Rich," in the 1980s.
Those two parts led to her role on "Designing Women," a comedy about the lives of four women at an interior design firm in Atlanta.
Carter and Delta Burke played the sparring sisters who ran the firm. The series also starred Annie Potts and Jean Smart.
The show, whose reruns have rarely left the airwaves, was not a typical sitcom. It tackled such topics as sexism, ageism, body image and AIDS.
"It was something so unique, because there had never been anything quite like it," Potts told The Associated Press at a 2006 cast reunion. "We had Lucy and Ethel, but we never had that exponentially expanded, smart, attractive women who read newspapers and had passions about things and loved each other and stood by each other."
Carter appeared on the drama "Family Law" from 1999 to 2002, and in her last major TV appearance she played Gloria Hodge, the surly mother-in-law to Marcia Cross's Bree on "Desperate Housewives."
Carter said the role was far from the kindly woman she played on "Designing Women."
"It's a vast difference," Carter said while filming the series. "Gloria Hodge doesn't have any redeeming qualities except her intelligence."
In addition to Holbrook, Carter is survived by daughters Mary Dixie and Ginna.`

Peter Graves, ‘Mission: Impossible’ Star, Dies at 83

Peter Graves, the cool spymaster of television’s “Mission: Impossible” and the dignified host of the “Biography” series, who successfully spoofed his own gravitas in the “Airplane!” movie farces, died on Sunday. He was 83.

He died of a heart attack at his home in Pacific Palisades, Calif., said Fred Barman, his business manager.
It was a testament to Mr. Graves’s earnest, unhammy ability to make fun of himself that after decades of playing square he-men and straitlaced authority figures, he was perhaps best known to younger audiences for a deadpan line in “Airplane!” (“Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”) and one from a memorable Geico car insurance commercial (“I was one lucky woman”).
Born Peter Aurness in Minneapolis, the blond, 6-foot-2 Mr. Graves served in the Army Air Forces in 1944 and ’45, studied drama at the University of Minnesota under the G.I. Bill of Rights and played the clarinet in local bands before following his older brother, James Arness, to Hollywood.
His first credited film appearance was in “Rogue River” (1950), with Rory Calhoun. Mr. Graves’s getting a Hollywood contract for the picture persuaded his fiancée’s family to let her marry him. He changed his name for that movie to Graves, his maternal grandfather’s name, to avoid confusion with his older brother.
He soon found himself in classics like Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17” (1953), where he played a security officer with a secret; Charles Laughton’s “Night of the Hunter” (1955); Otto Preminger’s “Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell” (1955); and John Ford’s “Long Gray Line” (1955).
Mr. Graves became known for taking all his roles seriously, injecting a certain believability into even the campiest plot. He appeared in westerns like “The Yellow Tomahawk” (1954) and “Wichita” (1955); a Civil War adventure, “The Raid” (1954); and gangster movies (“Black Tuesday,” 1954, and “The Naked Street,” 1955). He played earnest scientists in science fiction/horror films: “Killers From Space” (1954), “It Conquered the World” (1956) and “Beginning of the End” (1957, about giant grasshoppers in Chicago). There was also cold war science fiction anti-Communism: “Red Planet Mars” (1952).
Other movies included “East of Sumatra” (1953), “Beneath the 12-Mile Reef” (1953), “A Rage to Live” (1965), “Texas Across the River” (1966), “Sergeant Ryker” (1968), “The Ballad of Josie” (1968), “The Five-Man Army” (1969), “The Clonus Horror” (1979), “The Guns and the Fury” (1981), “Savannah Smiles” (1982), “Number One With a Bullet” (1986), “Addams Family Values” (1993), “The House on Haunted Hill” (1999) and “Men in Black II” (2002).
In 1955 Mr. Graves began his career as a television series regular as the star of “Fury,” a western family adventure series about a rancher named Jim Newton, his orphaned ward and the boy’s black stallion. It ran until 1960 on NBC, helped pioneer television adventure series and solidified Mr. Graves’s TV credentials.
Some of his hundreds of television credits include “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Whiplash” (1961), “The Dean Martin Show” (1970), the Herman Wouk mini-series “The Winds of War” (1983) and “War and Remembrance” (1988), “Fantasy Island” (1978-83) and “7th Heaven” (1999-2005). He served as the host or narrator for numerous television specials and performed in television movies of the week like “The President’s Plane Is Missing” (1973), “Where Have All the People Gone” (1974) and “Death Car on the Freeway” (1979).
Mr. Graves played his most famous television character from 1967 to 1973 in “Mission: Impossible,” reprising it from 1988 to 1990. He was Jim Phelps, the leader of the Impossible Missions Force, a super-secret government organization that conducted dangerous undercover assignments (which he always chose to accept). After the tape summarizing the objective self-destructed, the team would use not violence, but elaborate con games to trap the villains. In his role, Mr. Graves was a model of cool, deadpan efficiency.
But he was appalled when his agent sent him the script for the role of a pedophile pilot in “Airplane!” (1980). “I tore my hair and ranted and raved and said, ‘This is insane,’ he recalled on “Biography” in 1997. Some of the role’s lines (“Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”) looked at first as if they could get him thrown in jail, never mind ruining his career. He told his agent to tell David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, the director-producers, to find themselves a comedian. He relented when the Zucker brothers explained that the secret of their spoof would be the deadpan behavior of the cast; they didn’t want a comedian, they wanted the Peter Graves of “Fury” and “Mission: Impossible.”
Mr. Graves used his familiar earnest, all-American demeanor in service of some of the comic movie’s most outrageous moments. He reprised the role of Captain Oveur in “Airplane II” in 1982.
Starting in the mid-1980s Mr. Graves was the host of a number of television science specials on “Discover.” In 1987, he became the host of the Arts and Entertainment Network’s long-running “Biography” series, narrating the lives of figures like Prince Andrew, Muhammad Ali, pioneers of the space program, Churchill, Ernie Kovacs, Edward G. Robinson, Sophia Loren, Jackie Robinson, Howard Hughes, Steven Spielberg and Jonathan Winters.
In 1997, Mr. Graves was the subject of his own “Biography” presentation, “Peter Graves: Mission Accomplished.” In 2002, Mr. Graves was interviewed for a special about the documentary series, “Biography: 15 Years and Counting.”
Mr. Graves won a Golden Globe Award in 1971 for his performance in “Mission: Impossible” and in 1997, he and “Biography” won an Emmy Award for outstanding informational series.
In 1998, he joined his wife, Joan, in an effort to get Los Angeles to ban gasoline-powered leaf blowers from residential areas, testifying before the City Council, “’We’re all victims of these machines.”
In addition to his brother, he is survived by his wife, Joan Graves, and three daughters, Amanda Lee Graves, Claudia King Graves and Kelly Jean Graves.

Davy Crockett actor Fess Parker dies, aged 85

Actor Fess Parker, famous for playing American pioneer Davy Crockett in Walt Disney's classic 1950s TV series, has died in California at the age of 85.

The Texas-born actor launched a craze for coonskin caps and buckskin shirts with his sturdy turn as the US icon.
Parker went on to play Daniel Boone, another real-life frontiersman, in a 1960s TV show before retiring.
Actor turned California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger paid tribute to him as "a true Hollywood legend".
"Fess Parker has been a role model and idol of mine since I first saw him on the big screen," he said in a statement.
"As a talented actor and successful businessman, he was an inspirational Californian whose contributions to our state will be remembered forever."
Born in Fort Worth and raised in San Angelo, Parker served in the US Navy and graduated from the University of Texas before trying his hand at acting.
He subsequently landed a contract with Warner Brothers, making his motion picture debut in Springfield Rifle in 1952.
In 1954, at the age of 29, he was cast in a three-episode miniseries about Crockett, the "King of the Wild Frontier" whose life became an American folk legend.
The programme was enormously popular with viewers and featured a theme song that topped the charts for 13 weeks.
After largely retiring from show business, Parker became a prominent California winemaker and developer.
He died of natural causes at his Santa Ynez Valley home on Thursday - the same day Marcella, his wife of 50 years, celebrated her 84th birthday.