Terry Carter, Barrier-Breaking Actor and Documentarian, Dies at 95
He was the only Black actor on “Combat!” and “The Phil Silvers Show,” then made well regarded documentaries on luminaries like Duke Ellington and Katherine Dunham.
Terry Carter, who broke color barriers onstage and on television in the 1950s and ’60s and later produced multicultural documentaries on the jazz luminary Duke Ellington and the dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham, died on Tuesday at his home in Midtown Manhattan. He was 95.
His death was confirmed by his son, Miguel Carter DeCoste.
Mr. Carter was raised in a bilingual home next door to a synagogue in a predominantly Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn. His best friend was the future jazz great Cecil Taylor. In his first stage role, at 9, Mr. Carter played the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama on a voyage of discovery.
And in a wayfaring six-decade career, he was a merchant seaman, a jazz pianist, a law student, a television news anchor, a familiar character on network sitcoms, an Emmy-winning documentarian, a good will ambassador to China, a longtime expatriate in Europe — and a reported dead man; in 2015, rumors that he had been killed were mistaken. It was not him but a much younger Terry Carter who had died in a hit-and-run accident in Los Angeles by a pickup truck driven by the rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight.
Slightly misquoting Mark Twain, Mr. Carter posted on social media: “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
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While he acted in some 30 television series and movies, Mr. Carter was best known to viewers as Sgt. Joe Broadhurst, the sidekick to Deputy Marshal Sam McCloud (Dennis Weaver) on NBC’s “McCloud” series from 1970 to 1977, and in 21 episodes of “Battlestar Galactica,” as Colonel Tigh, second-in-command of the starship fleet in ABC’s original science-fiction series in 1978-79. (The series was revived for a second run from 2004 to 2009.)
In the 1950s, when many American entertainments were racially segregated and hundreds of actors had been blacklisted during Communist witch-hunts by congressional investigators, Mr. Carter met the veteran actor Howard Da Silva, whose Hollywood and television career had stalled in 1951 after he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
“It was Howard who talked me into becoming an actor — he’s the one who changed my life,” Mr. Carter said in an interview for this obituary in 2018. “I quit law school and began studying at Howard’s acting school. I think he called it the Mobile Theater Workshop.”
Mr. Carter appeared in several Black-cast stage productions, both on Broadway and Off Broadway, before breaking into television as the only Black character on “The Phil Silvers Show” (1955-59), playing Pvt. Sugie Sugarman in 92 half-hour episodes of the CBS comedy about an Army con man, Sergeant Bilko, and his motor pool crew.
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The show was filmed before studio audiences in New York City. Memorized lines were occasionally flubbed, there were awkward pauses, and the actors often improvised to cover the gaffes, all of which created a spirit of camaraderie in the cast.
“Well, I am the last living survivor of ‘The Phil Silvers Show,’” Mr. Carter said in 2018. “But I’m reluctant to take too much credit for being the only Black man on the show. I was only a cog in the wheel. I slew the foe, but I was just a ham like everybody else. It was a wonderful bunch.”
In 1958, Mr. Carter co-produced an Off Broadway version of Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The predominantly Black cast featured the actress Hilda Simms as the faded Southern belle Blanche du Bois, and Black actors played Stanley and Stella Kowalski, while white actors filled smaller parts.
Mr. Carter starred with the British actress Sally Ann Howes in “Kwamina,” a 1961 avant-garde musical that explored the romance between a white female doctor and an African tribal chief’s son. After previews in Toronto and Boston, it ran for 32 performances on Broadway.
Also in 1961, Mr. Carter appeared in the Hollywood film “Parrish,” starring Claudette Colbert, Karl Malden and Troy Donahue in a Delmer Daves adaptation of a Mildred Savage novel about family conflicts on a tobacco plantation. And in 1965 he was the only Black actor to portray a G.I. in any of the 152 episodes of the World War II series “Combat!,” which appeared on ABC from 1962 to 1967.
After decades onstage and onscreen, Mr. Carter formed his own production company in 1975 and made educational documentaries. In the 1980s, he expanded into more sophisticated documentaries for PBS, the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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In 1988, his two-part documentary, “A Duke Named Ellington,” for the PBS American Masters Series, became the United States entry in television festivals around the world. Narrated and directed by Mr. Carter, it used recorded interviews with Ellington, who died in 1974, and filmed performances by his orchestra. It won CINE Golden Eagle and Golden Antenna awards and an Emmy nomination.
“We went through about 70 hours of film footage, over 90 percent of which has never been seen before,” Mr. Carter told The Times. “Going through this material was like discovering plutonium when you’re searching for a common metal.”
He also produced and directed “Katherine Dunham: Dancing With Life,” documenting the career of the dancer, choreographer and anthropologist who died at 96 in 2006. Described as a “work in progress,” the film was screened in 2013 at Town Hall in Manhattan.
Terry Carter was born John Everett DeCoste on Dec. 16, 1928, in Brooklyn, the only child of William and Mercedes (Durio) DeCoste. His father was a handyman, and his mother managed the home. At home he learned Spanish and gained an appreciation for cultural diversity. He was an excellent student in public schools and graduated from the elite Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan in 1946.
Mr. Carter later joined the merchant marine and served on a ship that carried European war refugees to Latin America. He played piano with a jazz combo in Boston while attending Northeastern University, and studied law at St. John’s University for nearly two years before turning to acting. (Returning to Northeastern, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree there in 1983.)
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Mr. Carter’s first major Broadway role was the lead opposite Eartha Kitt in “Mrs. Patterson” (1954), about poverty and ambitious dreams.
In 1964, while working in Europe, he married Anna Scratuglia, his Italian tutor in Rome. They had two children, Miguel and Melinda, and were divorced in 1990. In 1991, he married Beate Glatved, a film editor. She died in 2006. In 2009, he married Selome Zenebe, who had a daughter, Hiwot Minale, from a previous relationship.
In addition to his son, Mr. Carter is survived by his wife, his daughter, his stepdaughter and one granddaughter.
From 1965 to 1968, Mr. Carter was New England’s first Black news anchor, at WBZ-TV in Boston, then a Westinghouse-owned NBC affiliate.
He went to China in 1991 for the United States Information Agency on a cultural lecture tour, and after nearly two decades working in Scandinavia, he returned to New York in 2013.
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