15 Things You Never Knew About ‘Designing Women’

Dixie Carter, Jean Smart, Annie Potts, and Delta Burke didn't audition for their roles. The show's creator, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, wrote the sitcom for them.

Delta Burke met Gerald McRaney when he played the role of her character's ex-husband. They got married in 1989, and are still together!

"Designing Women" was almost cancelled. A huge letter-writing campaign saved it--and it hit ratings gold when CBS moved it to Monday nights.

Dixie Carter was the matron of honor at Delta Burke's wedding.

Carter, then 46, had plastic surgery between the first and second seasons. "I thought if this turns out to be my first big success, I couldn't bear to be identified as 'the older one,'" she said later.

Dolly Parton was a HUGE fan of the show, and lobbied to be a guest star. She got her wish when she played Charlene's "guardian movie star" on January 1, 1990.

Julia Sugarbaker's politics didn't always suit Carter, a libertarian.Whenever her character gave liberal speeches Carter didn't agree with, she got to sing in the following episode.

Elizabeth Taylor wrote Burke a letter, calling her courageous in the face of tabloid headlines about her weight gain. "Whenever I'm down, I read it," Burke told Ladies Home Journal.

Jean Smart met Richard Gilliland on set. She asked Gilliland, a crossword-puzzle pro, to help her solve one--and the two got married in 1987.

Hal Holbrooke, Dixie Carter's real-life husband, had a recurring role as Julia Sugarbaker's boyfriend.

Smart, originally from Seattle, was the only lead who WASN'T from the South. Burke was from Florida, Potts from Kentucky, and Carter from Tennessee.

During her pitch for the sitcom, CBS executives asked Bloodworth-Thomason what the setting was. "Uh….an interior design company,” Thomason ad-libbed. Sold!

Annie Potts got pregnant during the sixth season. But since Mary Jo Shivley was single, Potts had to hide her belly in oversized shirts and behind strategically placed furniture.

Anthony Bouvier, Meshach Taylor's character, was a one-off character. But Taylor had so much chemistry with the four actresses that Bouvier was written into the show.

Burke and Carter worked together on another Bloodworth-Thomason sitcom--"Filthy Rich," which ran for one year in the early 1980s.