Allison Sugarbaker

Allison Sugarbaker is a character in the television series, "Designing Women". She is played by actress Julia Duffy.

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Allison is a petite woman, who buys the shares of the Sugarbaker design firm from her cousin, Suzanne Sugarbaker when the former moves to Japan to live with her mother. (Suzanne, although at times very shallow, wasn't obliquely or outright mean to people all the time, whereas Allison could be (and was) very mean to others.) She seems to think that she is better than she really is and sometimes goes to wild lengths to prove this point to other characters, even going so far as to outright lie.

From the moment she arrives in Atlanta, Georgia, she causes trouble for and alienates everyone. She and Anthony Bouvier begin a semi-War of the Roses, over Suzanne's house, which she unwittingly leased to both of them. (Anthony eventually gets control of the house, and Allison lives there as well) Not to mention she brings in an extremely huge desk replete with a huge Ferris wheel rolodex, which completely takes up much of the downstairs work area of Sugarbakers.

As she attempts to pull rank, insult, and criticize everyone, she fails to start off on the right foot with her cousin, Julia Sugarbaker. (Julia's uncle Frank, is Allison's father) In fact, Julia's dream is to embarrass and annihilate Allison in front of a huge crowd at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, as she pointedly tells her in her first appearance. Julia also tells her that either she tones down her haughty attitude or she will kill her. This sets the stage for outright hostility between the two. Allison also has a tendency to use quotation marks (derisively called "little rabbit marks" by Julia) whenever she doesn't believe what she is told, a tactic that, more often as not, infuriates her coworkers.

She does however gain a friend and becomes a mentor to Carlene Dobber, the newly hired sister of Charlene Frazier Stillfield; although at times she can be rather nasty towards her. Her sunny personality (which everyone else finds pleasant) grates on Allison so much that she sometimes snappishly calls her Mrs. Rogers. She doesn't think too highly of Julia's friend, Bernice Clifton, or of anyone else, for that matter.

Allison grew up in the south, attended Wellesley College and then worked in New York City for most of her career. She was a seeing eye person for a blind older woman, named Mrs. Digby; then worked for a fabric company. She helped put away someone who had committed insider trading. Then a former paramour named Barry Bintzer, the man she had arrested, (played by Miss Duffy's real-life husband, Jerry Lacy) asked her to marry her then proceeds to jilt her at the altar as retribution. One of her lies was that she was supposed to be a bridesmaid at Marla Maples wedding to Donald Trump. That was proven to be a lie when Marla puts off the wedding.

Like Suzanne, she had very limited experience in decorating. However, unlike Suzanne, Allison is political, presumably a conservative, which explains the extreme animosity between her, Julia and Mary Jo on the Clarence Thomas confirmation. (Julia and Mary Jo, both unabashedly liberal, thought Anita Hill was telling the truth, and Allison believed that she was lying). Of course, Thomas was confirmed. During her birthday party, the gloating Allison rubbed it in, which truly set off Mary Jo. Truly furious, she went off on a diatribe against the utter sexism of the whole thing that would have made Julia, "The Terminator," proud.

Much like Suzanne used to be, Allison wasn't sympathetic to gays. An example of this was when Julia had gone to a symphony concert with a man named Mark (Charles Frank). Allison thought that because he dressed nice, had a clean apartment and wasn't a chauvinist, she thought he was gay. It turned out he wasn't, which mortified her because she always thought she was right and she hated it that she was proven wrong, this was one of her pet peeves, and her tendency to always think that she was right did nothing but infuriate her co-workers even more.

She also became close to Mary Jo's chauvinistic brother, Skip, when he came to Atlanta to take his nephew, Quint, deer hunting, which angered Mary Jo, who barely tolerated her anyway, but harbored a lot of resentment towards her because of her blatant insults toward her best friend Charlene, when she first arrived at Sugarbakers.

After one year of her obnoxious, infuriating and often grating personality, she pulls her financial backing from Sugarbaker's to purchase a more lucrative Victoria's Secret franchise back in New York. (This also gives Anthony control of Suzanne's house, to his utter glee) This characteristically selfish act of Allison's ends up plunging Sugarbaker's into near-bankruptcy. Her financial backing is replaced by the more down-to-earth and wealthier Bonnie Jean "B.J." Poteet.