Terry Carter, “Battlestar Galactica” and “Foxy Brown” actor, dies at 95

Carter was also a prolific documentary filmmaker and a broadcast news anchor.

Terry Carter, the pioneering actor, documentarian, and broadcaster whose screen credits included the original Battlestar Galactica, McCloud, and Foxy Brown, died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.

A statement posted on Carter’s website did not disclose a cause of death but said he died peacefully at home.

Born John Everett DeCoste in 1928, Carter grew up in Brooklyn and attended several colleges, including Hunter College, Boston University, UCLA, Northeastern University, and St. John’s University School of Law. He studied acting with Howard Da Silva in the early 1950s and played a number of roles in Broadway and Off Broadway stage productions during his early career, including Mrs. Patterson, in which he appeared opposite Eartha Kitt.

everett collection Terry Carter

Carter’s breakthrough screen project was The Phil Silvers Show, on which he played Pvt. Sugie Sugarman from 1955 to 1959 and was the only regular Black cast member. In the 1960s, he appeared on a number of TV shows, including the World War II drama Combat, where he was the only Black GI character in the entire series. Carter also served as an anchorman for Boston’s NBC affiliate network WBZ-TV from 1965 to 1968, making him New England’s first Black news anchor.

Carter appeared in many of his most prominent projects in the 1970s. After leading the 1973 Blaxploitation film Brother on the Run, Carter portrayed Pam Grier’s boyfriend in the genre’s seminal hit Foxy Brown in 1974. That same year, he played a police officer in the dog-centric family film Benji. Carter also portrayed second-in-command Colonel Tigh on the sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica in the late ’70s and Sgt. Joe Broadhurst, the protagonist’s partner on McCloud, for seven seasons.

Carter launched his own production company, Meta/4 Productions, in Los Angeles in 1975. He and his company produced more than 100 educational documentaries, some of which were for the Library of Congress, PBS, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Among his most notable documentary projects were Katherine Dunham Technique, which captured the process of the titular choreographer, and A Duke Named Ellington, a two-part doc that explored the life and music of the renowned jazz pianist Duke Ellington. The latter project received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Informational Special.

ABC Photo Archives/getty Terry Carter as Colonel Tigh on ‘Battlestar Galactica’

In the early 1990s, Carter made another documentary on Dunham, Katherine Dunham: Dancing With Life. The United States Information Agency sent him on a tour of China to liaise with the country’s students and filmmakers during the same period. He spent the final years of his career working in Scandinavia before retiring to New York City in 2013. Carters survivors include his wife, daughter, son, and stepdaughter.

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