Delta Burke Details Crystal Meth Use, Struggles In Public Eye, ‘Ugly’ Designing Women Exit

The actress, who has since stepped away from Hollywood, was one of the most famous women on television at the time of her departure from the long-running series in 1991, after its fifth season. She was also one of the most scrutinized, with tabloids hyper-focused for years on her weight.

Chatting on the Glamorous Trash podcast with Chelsea Devantez, Burke admitted that she’d been taking daily pills since she was in acting school in an attempt to manage her weight. But when her body began to resist those, she took more drastic measures.

“Nobody knew about crystal meth at the time,” she said. She said she was advised to snort it, but didn’t want to do that, “so I put it in cranberry juice.”

The former Miss Florida said that after drinking that down, she “wouldn’t eat for five days, and they were still saying, ‘Your butt’s too big. Your legs are too big.'”

“And I now look back at those pictures and go, ‘I was a freaking goddess,'” Burke added. This was just prior to her landing Designing Women, when she worked with Bloodworth-Thomason on her previous series, Filth Rich.

Burke admitted she was “too emotionally fragile” to handle the nastiness that came from the press and the public about her weight — she shared one story about a fan jerking open her coat and asking, “Let’s see, how fat are ya?”

“I thought I was stronger. I tried very hard to defend myself against lies and all the ugliness that was there and I wasn’t gonna win,” Burke shared. “I’m just an actress, you know. I don’t have any power.”

Despite her efforts, the onslaught started to impact her work, too, with Burke admitting her “whole body language changed,” with her hunching over and trying to disappear. Fame wasn’t at all what she had imagined.

“I thought that meant that you would be a famous and well-respected actress, but that’s not what it meant,” she said. “And the moment I became famous, it was like, ‘Oh no, no, no. This is not what I had in mind at all. I don’t think I want to be this anymore.’ But then it’s too late.”

That scrutiny over Burke’s figure didn’t just come from fans or the press — though they were relentless in covering every fluctuation in her shape — but also from home. That’s why, she said, she first fell so hard for her longtime husband, Major Dad and This Is Us alum Gerald McRaney.

“Whatever went down that was bad, it was worth because I met him,” she said. “No one had ever loved me completely for me, not even my mother or grandmother. They would judge what I looked like. He never did.”

At the time of her exit from the show, Bloodworth-Thomason and her husband, and show executive producer, Harry Thomason, said that McRaney was to blame. They argued that he had changed their star once they started dating.

Burke’s counter-argument at the time was that Bloodworth-Thomason was psychologically abusing her and relentlessly pressuring her about her weight. Now, though, she says she’s grateful she wound up staying as long as she did.

“I wanted to leave and I wasn’t allowed to leave,” she explained, expressing that she felt overwhelmed by the spotlight. “Staying gave me an amazing character to get to play, grow older and fatter with. And I loved it, how she evolved. I had that even though it could be difficult sometimes.”

As for the falling out, Burke has chosen not to get into the dirt. Instead, she said that while she was “so happy” to be part of Designing Women, “then things started to change.” Those changes, “combined with becoming famous, I simply couldn’t cope with.”

Of Bloodworth-Thomason, who Burke at one time thought of as a “mentor,” she has since put the description “love-hate” on their relationship. “I’m very thankful for everything that she’s done for me, but there’s other issues,” Burke said. “Basically we tried to kill each other, but you know, we survived.”

In fact, the duo would work together again on Women of the House, a spin-off of Designing Women that launched in 1995 that saw her character moving into the world of politics. The series didn’t do much, though, getting canceled before finishing its initial 13-episode order (Lifetime aired the final four episodes).

Eventually, Burke stepped away from her own fame and Hollywood altogether after juggling the demanding schedules of the working actor with McRaney. Finally, she said, “It just got too much for me.”

“It got too ugly. And all of a sudden, one day, it was like the joy of acting left me,” she explained. “It had been ruined by the ugliness that goes, unfortunately, with a lot of the business. I just withdrew from the work because the joy was not there anymore.”

Burke left Designing Women at the height of the show’s success, just as it was breaking into Nielsen’s Top 10 in ratings. She starred as Suzanne Sugarbaker alongside Dixie Carter as her sister Julia, Jean Smart as Charlene Frazier Stillfield, and Annie Potts as Mary Jo Shively.

The show centered around the women running a design firm in Atlanta, Georgia. It also starred Meshach Taylor as their delivery-man-turned-partner Anthony Bouvier. Smart excited alongside Burke after Season 5, leading to the addition of Julia Duffy as cousin Allison Sugarbaker and Jan Hooks as Charlene’s sister Carlene Frazier-Dobber. Duffy would in turn be replaced by Judith Ivey’s Bonnie Jean “BJ” Poteet for Season 7.

The entire original cast, including Burke, did reunite in 2003 for The Designing Women Reunion special, which looked back at the groundbreaking series.

While her husband continues to work regularly, and Burke herself picks up the occasional acting gig, she says she’s happy where she’s at. “I love my life truly for the first time. And I love him desperately,” she said of her husband of 34 years.

“I know that I’m safe and I’m loved. I didn’t feel that there,” Burke said of her time at the top. “I wanted to be so much, and I didn’t get to be what I wanted to be, but I got to go there, and I got to be an actress, and I got to make people laugh, which I loved very much.”