Speakers & VIPs

Dixie Carter

Dixie Carter starred for the past three seasons as attorney Randi King on the CBS Monday night drama series, Family Law. Miss Carter starred as Julia Sugarbaker in the seven-year CBS series Designing Women. She has performed starring roles in five other TV series, On Our Own, Out of the Blue, Filthy Rich, Diff’rent Strokes and Fired Up, as well as television movies and mini-series. She met her husband while filming the CBS TV movie The Killing of Randy Webster.

In 1997, Miss Carter played to standing ovations on Broadway as Maria Callas in Terrence McNally’s play Master Class. The following year she starred in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance in the role of Mrs. Arbuthnot at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. In 1996, she created the character of Stella Adler in the play Names by Mark Kemble. In 1993, she starred as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire in Memphis, where she began her acting career while still a college student.

Carter performed for 10 years at the Café Carlyle in New York City, and appears in concerts nationwide.

She has produced two yoga videos for MCA/Universal, Dixie Carter’s Unworkout, a platinum release, and Yoga for You. Her book, Trying to Get to Heaven, was published by Simon and Schuster in 1996, and re-released in soft cover in 1997. She has recorded it for audio, as well as two other books on tape, Scarlett, for Simon and Schuster, and A Southern Belle Primer for Bantam audio. For the second year in a row, Miss Carter’s Bell South Yellow Pages advertising campaign has won the prestigious National EFFIE Award.

Miss Carter appeared on Broadway in Sextet and Circle in the Square’s revival of Pal Joey, and off Broadway in A Couple A White Chicks Sittin’ Around Talkin’. She debuted with the New York Shakespeare Festival in A Winter’s Tale. Other plays under the aegis of Joseph Papp and the New York Public Theatre were Jesse and the Bandit Queen, Gogol, Buried Inside Extra (In New York and at the Royal Court in London), Taken in Marriage, and Fathers and Sons (in New York and in Los Angeles). She has also starred in Kiss Me Kate, A Little Night Music, Mame, The Merry Widow, Man of LaMancha, Babes in Arms, Carousel, Oklahoma, Brigadoon, The King and I, The New Moon, and The Student Prince.

Dixie Carter was born in McLemoresville, Tennessee. Valedictorian of her high school class, she attended the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Rhoses College in Memphis, from which she has since received an honorary doctorate, and is a graduate of the University of Memphis.

On April 23, 2002, in Washington, D.C., Miss Carter was sworn in by Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.