Julia Sugarbaker

Infobox character | colour = #cc9966
name = Julia Sugarbaker
other_names = Julia McIlroy


caption =
portrayer = Dixie Carter
creator = Linda Bloodworth-Thomason
species =
gender = Female
first = "Pilot"
last = "Gone With a Whim"
cause = End of series
age =
occupation = interior designer
nickname = "The Terminator"
title = widow
family = Derek and Perky Sugarbaker (parents),
Suzanne Sugarbaker (sister),
Clayton Sugarbaker (half-brother),
Payne McIlroy (son)
spouse = Hayden McIlroy (husband, deceased),
Reese Watson (boyfriend, deceased)
relatives = Allison Sugarbaker (cousin),
Jennifer Sugarbaker (niece),
Camilla Sugarbaker (niece)
Desiree Sugarbaker (adopted niece)
footnotes =

Julia McIlroy (born Julia Sugarbaker) is a fictional character in the long-running television series "Designing Women". She was played for the show's entire run by actress and singer Dixie Carter.

Dixie, a registered Republican, however, quite libertarian, found it a bit hard to play the extremely left-leaning character and so made a deal with the producers. For every Terminator rant that Julia shouted, Dixie, who was beginning a cabaret style show, was able to sing in other episodes.

The head of Sugarbaker's

Julia is the daughter and eldest child of Derek and Perky Sugarbaker (Louise Latham). She is twelve years older than her sister, former beauty queen Suzanne Sugarbaker; between them in age is their half-brother Clayton (Lewis Grizzard). Clayton has two daughters, Camilla (who acts exactly like Julia) and Jennifer; they were portrayed on the show by Dixie Carter's real life daughters, Ginna and Mary Dixie. Decidedly more artistic and prone to speak her mind than her vain sister, she supposes herself to be more well-read and more knowledgable.

Julia lived in many places, including New York and in Paris, where she once studied. While her sister Suzanne has been married three times in her life, Julia was married only once, and it was to the love of her life.

Julia's husband, Hayden McIlroy, died of a heart attack prior to the start of the show. At loose ends, Julia then decided to open an interior design business out of her home. She hired a top-notch decorator, Mary Jo Shively, a divorced mother of two; she also asked Suzanne to join in the business, mainly as a financial backer (although Suzanne claimed to be the head salesperson). Julia hired her late husband's secretary, Charlene Frazier Stillfield to be their office manager. Later on, she hired deliveryman Anthony Bouvier, who the women later made a partner.

Another person close to Julia, although definitely not related to her, was her mother's best friend, Bernice Clifton. Bernice had what Julia's mother called "an arterial flow problem above the neck." This got her into the most outlandish of situations; but she considered Julia and her friends to be part of her family.

Julia's pride and joy was her son, Payne McIlroy, named after her paternal great-grandfather. He gave her fits on occasion, but she dearly loved him, seeing her husband in him. Payne was married to Sylvie, a girl he met while in college (both supposedly attended Vanderbilt University), and thought that he had gotten pregnant. The marriage was strained due to the discovery that she wasn't pregnant after all, but Julia gently talked her son into going back to New York City, where he and his wife lived, to work things out with her.

Julia eventually became involved with attorney Reese Watson, who was equally as bombastic as she was; his nickname for her was "Sassy". (Reese was played by Dixie Carter's real-life husband, Hal Holbrook) until he died in the show's fifth season. When he died, ironically, of a heart attack, the same medical condition that befell her late husband, she almost fell apart. He had also had a heart attack in the second season of the show (See below) and both times, she was understandably upset and scared, which, given her normal strength, is quite unusual for her.

These catastrophic situations allowed the normally shallow Suzanne to truly rise to the occasion, come into her own, and help to make arrangements (such as getting the store open), to deal with the other details that Julia wasn't up to handling at that moment, and also to give her sister some much needed comfort. A prime example of this part of Suzanne's character, was this exchange from the second season episode, "Heart Attacks" where she comforts Julia, after Reese suffered his first heart attack:

*:Suzanne: I called Ansel and Margaret (Reese's son and daughter) and told them that their daddy was holding his own; Margaret's catching the first plane out of Phoenix; and a friend of mine on the board of Regents at Duke will fly Ansel in his own plane, they will arrive at two. I called Anthony and he's on his way here, and I gave him instructions on opening the store in the morning.
*:Julia: I wish someone would come out and tell us something, I can't stand all this waiting!
*:Suzanne: Julia, I want you to get a hold of yourself, you come on over here and rest.
*:Julia: I don't want to rest, I want to be with Reese.
*:Suzanne: I know, but you can't. He wouldn't even know you were there.
*:Julia: But I would. I can't stand to think about him dying with strangers. That's the way it happened with Hayden. (sobbing) They wouldn't let me be with him, and he was calling for me!
*:Suzanne: Julia, listen to me. I know how you feel about that. That's why I told the doctor that if at any time it looks like Reese isn't gonna make it, they're to come out here and get you.
*:Julia: You did?
*:Charlene AND Mary Jo: You did?!
*:Suzanne: Yes, I did. And you know what? They haven't come for you, have they?
*:Julia: No, they haven't.
*:Suzanne: See, that's a good sign.
*:Julia: Yes, it is. Thank you for doing that. (crying and hugging Suzanne)
*:Suzanne: That's all right. We're just gonna sit down over here together, and you rest your head on my shoulder okay?
*:Charlene: (to Mary Jo) It's amazing, isn't it? Most of the time she goes around without the sense God gave a goose. Look at her. I mean, one crisis, and she's Scarlett O'Hara. Who'd have guessed it?

At about the same time of Reese's death, Julia helped take care of a client's unruly daughter, Randa Oliver (Lexi Randall). Her unruliness was part of a deep seated resentment towards her overindulgent parents, who were forever leaving her alone to be looked after only by the servants, whilst they gallivanted off around Europe.

Randa's anger was mainly at her mother, who was always off in the South of France. Julia even put a governess that was supposed to take care of her in her place, when the highly snobbish woman disparagingly called Randa a brat. After a highly difficult night, which drained the two of them to no end, Randa was more polite and pleasant to be around. She stayed on for about three episodes.

After sufficient mourning for Reese, she then went out with a doctor, named Dr. Hacker, (played by musician Gary Morris) who was taking care of her for a hysterectomy, but that too failed.

She was very cool towards; often not too fond of, and sometimes outirght hostile towards her obnoxious cousin, Allison Sugarbaker, who had taken over Suzanne's share of the business, and also, to Anthony's consternation, Suzanne's house. In fact, her relationship with Allison was almost all-out war. She got along a lot better with Allison's replacement, down-to-earth wealthy widow, Bonnie Jean "B.J." Poteet.

The "Terminator"

Julia, who is politically liberal, has a tendency to speak her mind, and at times it can be very forceful. This tendency of giving off rapid fire and well-worded spiels, against which her targets have absolutely no defense, gave her the apt nickname "The Terminator". (In the episode "The Candidate", Anthony called them her "machine gun, hellfire and brimstone diatribes")

The targets of these very verbose arguments have included, among others, politicians, newspaper reporters, pornography publishers, sleazy photographers and others whose beliefs or attitudes Julia finds intolerable. She has even used her terminator tirades to defend her sister, Suzanne, after a Miss Georgia World viciously insulted her.

While most of her tirades usually got results, other times, they weren't as successful. One of her tirades cost her a seat as a city commissioner when she told her more bigoted opponent, a man named Wison Brickett, off during a debate. His plan was to anger her, and it succeeded, giving him a landslide victory. Another tirade cost her a place on the annual historical tour of homes, when she told off the tour group, and the snide historical society representative, Karen (Mary Ann Mobley) about their selling of the myth of the Old South.

A more successful tirade however, sent a sleazy photographer, DeWitt Chiles (Ian Patrick Williams), out the door after he totally misrepresented himself to the well-meaning, but naive, Charlene, and nearly made Julia suck pearls, while dressed in a man's suit, no less. This situation also caused his assistant, Estelle Rhinehart (the late Wendie Jo Sperber), who despised him (in her words, she hated his guts), to quit her job. She then revealed that she herself was a photographer, and she stole his film, and replaced it with some more tamer pictures of women of Atlanta that Julia had suggested (as opposed to the more sexually explicit ones of the women at Sugarbakers that he was hoping to sell). This situation occurred in the episode, "The Women of Atlanta" in 1989. In the episode, the real-life restaurant Mary Mac's Tea Room, was mentioned.

One of her most venomous (and arguably her most successful) diatribe was toward a Dr. Mitchell who had a tendency to be rather arrogant and not very wise in the ways of medicine. She pointedly and furiously informed him that she was filing charges against him with the State Medical bureau and the American Medical Association, because he had the nerve to tell Charlene to not worry about a lump in her breast and to wait and see if it was malignant, which went against everything Julia had ever learned (she and Suzanne were brought up in a medical family). "That's not old school," Julia said furiously after hearing his flippant reply that he was "old school", "That is gross incompetence!!"

It also turned out that Julia and Suzanne had a mutual friend who was treated by that same doctor, with fatal results. The most powerful and memorable part of Julia's wrath came at the end when she told Dr. Mitchell, "You're seemingly a kind, benevolent authority figure who tells women to let you do their worrying for them, but there's just one thing wrong with that, Dr. Mitchell: you don't have to do their "dying!" This memorable tirade occurred in the episode "Old Spouses Never Die".

Another well remembered rant was against a so-called "old friend" and longstanding client of Julia's named Imogene Salinger, whom she had known for over twenty years, who had discovered that she and her co-workers were designing a funeral for Kendall Dobbs a design colleague who was gay and dying of AIDS. Julia eventually lost her as a customer, but felt better at having told off her intolerant ex-friend. In this tirade, she gained an unexpected ally in Suzanne, who is not usually known to be sympathetic towards gay people, but in this case, made an exception and also echoed her sister's indignity towards the homophobic comments, which had begun a change of heart for Suzanne about gay people. This occurred in the episode, "Killing All The Right People".

Yet another tirade (and one of Julia's last diatribes in the series) had Julia and the other members of Sugarbakers being en route to Washington, D.C. to the inauguration of Bill Clinton. (This was possible due to B.J.'s generous backing of the Democratic Party)

First their plane to Cincinnati was rerouted due to foul weather, and they had to land in St. Louis where Carlene got a ticket herself and eventually went on to Washington, after visiting her family; and then they landed in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Then the group went to a ticket agent at the airport, who, somewhat rudely, told them that they missed their flight; however, it turned out that it was the airline's fault that the flight was missed, due to all the unexpected changes and reroutings.

Julia, who had, up until then, had been relentlessly (and uncharacteristically) cheerful because Bill Clinton had won the election, finally snapped, grabbed the unhelpful ticket agent by his jacket lapels and unleashed her pent up frustration on him not being helpful to them, in view of everyone in the line. As it turned out, the airline was not very well liked as B.J. asked who hated this airline, and everyone's hands went up in the air.

Meanwhile the stunned ticket agent was completely defenseless against this verbal onslaught, not to mention that he had found out that the airline had just went out of business, that he started to cry. This was one of the rare occurrences that Julia's terminator tirades set someone to crying.

B.J. and Mary Jo had been full witness to it and in fact, Mary Jo had a running bet on when Julia would finally get mad. She then said to Anthony and Bernice, who had come to see what the commotion was all about, "1:15 PM, Central Standard Time, Julia blew! I win!" At the end, the entire group, including the former ticket agent, who was still crying, toasted the president from the Airport's Embassy Room and watching it on television, when they were stunned to see Carlene dancing at the White House. The group was also furious at this turn of events, as Carlene had voted for H. Ross Perot, and there she was dancing at the Inaugural Ball. The episode closed with an infuriated Julia shouting at the television, "Mr. President, that woman voted for Ross Perot!" This situation occurred in the episode called "Odyssey".

Despite her tendency to go off on one of her diatribes, not see both sides of an issue, and her extreme pride, Julia is a warm person and a good friend.