Dixie Carter, an actress who gave strong, opinionated Southern women a good name in the television series “Designing Women” in the 1980s and 1990s and later had success as a cabaret singer, died Saturday in Houston. She was 70 and lived in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Her death was announced by her husband, the actor Hal Holbrook, who said that the cause was complications of endometrial cancer.

In “Designing Women,” which ran for seven seasons on CBS, Carter’s character, Julia Sugarbaker, led what began as an all-woman interior design business in Atlanta and specialized in sarcasm. “If sex were fast food, there’d be an arch over your bed,” she once snapped at her sister Suzanne (played by Delta Burke). Yet when Julia went into a theatrical tirade, which was often, it usually was to serve some higher social or political principle.

For some time before, Carter had been a familiar face on television. She played the sophisticated office colleague of two naive young women in a 1977-78 series, “On Our Own”; the snooty wife of a plantation owner in “Filthy Rich” in 1982-83; and the vibrant new stepmother of Gary Coleman in the penultimate season of “Diff’rent Strokes” in 1984-85. She received her first and only Emmy nomination in 2007 for a recurring role as Marcia Cross’ scary mother-in-law on ABC’s “Desperate Housewives.”

Dixie Virginia Carter was born May 25, 1939, in McLe-moresville, Tenn., a small town roughly halfway between Memphis and Nashville. She was one of three children of Halbert Leroy Carter, a grocery and department store owner, and his wife, Virginia. She attended the University of Tennessee and Southwestern at Memphis, and graduated from Memphis State.

Early plans

She said that after hearing a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera at age 4 she immediately decided that she would move to New York to become an opera singer. She made her professional acting debut as Julie Jordan in a 1960 production of “Carousel” in Memphis and moved to New York in 1963.

That same year she played Perdita in a Joseph Papp production of “The Winter’s Tale” in Central Park. She then joined the Music Theater of Lincoln Center, which, under the leadership of Richard Rodgers specialized in reviving classic musicals. Yet Carter never rose above understudy and left in 1966 to join the revues at the Upstairs at the Downstairs nightclub. Lily Tomlin and Madeline Kahn were among the other performers.

She made her Broadway debut in 1974 in a short-lived musical, “Sextet,” for which she was singled out by critics, and she appeared in a 1976 revival of “Pal Joey.” In 1997, she received favorable reviews after replacing Zoe Caldwell as Maria Callas in Terence McNally’s “Master Class.” Her final Broadway appearance was in 2004, as Mrs. Meers in “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”

Cabaret singer

She said that it was her cabaret career, which began in the 1980s, that brought her the greatest creative satisfaction. “To me, there’s no feeling as gorgeous as the feeling of singing,” she told Stephen Holden of The New York Times in 1984. “It’s like flying.”

Six years later, when Carter was appearing at Cafe Carlyle, Holden described her as “one of the most vivid and endearing performers in a field already crowded with idiosyncratic per- sonalities.”

In 1967, Carter married Arthur L. Carter, a New York investment banker who later became owner and publisher of The New York Observer. They had two daughters. Carter left show business for eight years after her marriage. She later said that, during that period, she gradually lost confidence in her talents — to the point where she was afraid to sing.

“Eventually I lost the idea that I could have a career,” she said. “I thought I was too old.”

She and Carter divorced in 1977, and that same year she married the actor George Hearn. That marriage lasted only two years. In 1984, she married Holbrook, whom she had met doing a 1980 television film, “The Killing of Randy Webster.”

On screen

She made relatively few feature films, and her last screen appearance was in “That Evening Sun,” released last year. She played the wife of an elderly Southern farmer (Holbrook) who was fighting for his property.

In addition to Holbrook, she is survived by her daughters, Ginna Carter, of Los Angeles, and Mary Dixie Carter, of Brooklyn; a sister, Melba Helen Heath, of San Anselmo, Calif.; and several nieces and nephews.

Although Carter long ago moved to California for her television career, she and Holbrook also kept a home in McLemoresville. In 1999, she told The Palm Beach Post that she treasured the courtesy and kindness she found in Tennessee, a welcome contrast to the backstabbing and sniping of Hollywood.

“Of course, in the South, we talk about people, too,” she said. “But if you end your comments with ‘Bless her heart,’ you’re off the hook.”