Terry Carter

Terry Carter, born John Everett DeCoste on December 16, 1928, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City, was an African-American actor, filmmaker, and television journalist who worked across stage, screen, and broadcasting for decades. He died on April 23, 2024, in New York City at the age of 95.

Carter grew up in a mostly Italian neighborhood beside a synagogue. His mother, Mercedes, was a native of the Dominican Republic, and his father, William DeCoste, was of Argentinian and African-American descent and operated a radio repair business. His parents instilled in him an engagement with social issues; he walked his first picket line alongside his father at age 8. Future jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor was his childhood best friend. Carter made his first stage appearance at age 9, playing the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan in 1946 and subsequently joined the U.S. Merchant Marine, traveling abroad as a merchant seaman. After returning to the United States, he worked as a mail clerk at the New York Museum of Modern Art, where he watched every film programmed at the institution. He later attended courses at Hunter College, the University of California Los Angeles, Boston University, and Northeastern University, completing a Bachelor of Science degree in communications from Northeastern in 1983, decades after initially dropping out. He also completed two years of coursework at St. John's University's School of Law before leaving to pursue acting. Along the way, he worked nights as a jazz pianist.

Carter's path to acting began when he encountered actors Howard Da Silva and Morris Carnovsky while studying at St. John's law school. The two convinced him he had the makings of an actor, and after his second year of law school he left to pursue the profession full time, subsequently studying acting with Da Silva in the early 1950s. His Broadway career spanned from 1954 to 1961. He played the male lead opposite Eartha Kitt in the play Mrs. Patterson and performed the title role in the musical Kwamina. He also appeared in Finian's Rainbow.

Carter's first major screen breakthrough came as Pvt. Sugie Sugarman on The Phil Silvers Show, popularly known as Sergeant Bilko, in which he appeared as the sole Black regular cast member across 91 episodes between 1955 and 1959, making him one of the first Black actors to appear regularly on an American television program. In 1964, he played boxer Rosie Palmer in an episode of the ABC drama Breaking Point. The following year, he appeared as a guest star in the season three Combat! episode "The Long Wait," becoming the only Black actor to portray a soldier in that long-running World War II drama series.

From 1965 to 1968, Carter worked as a weekend newscaster for WBZ-TV in Boston, where he became an anchor-reporter and the station's first Black television news anchor, a distinction that also made him the first Black TV news anchor in New England. He additionally served as the station's first opening-night film and theater critic. Carter stated to the Black press that he was fired because Westinghouse, which owned WBZ, objected to his personal involvement in community projects, though the station characterized his departure as a resignation.

Returning to acting in 1970, Carter took on his longest-running role, starring as NYPD Sergeant Joe Broadhurst, partner to Dennis Weaver's title character, in the television detective series McCloud. The role lasted seven years. That same year he starred with Van Johnson and Ray Milland in the television film Company of Killers. In 1973 he played the lead role in the Blaxploitation film Brother on the Run, and appeared as the boyfriend of the title character in Foxy Brown, starring Pam Grier. In 1974 he played Police Officer Tuttle in the children's film Benji and starred in the Blaxploitation horror film Abby alongside William Marshall and Carol Speed. Carter became internationally recognized for his role as Colonel Tigh in the science-fiction television series Battlestar Galactica in the late 1970s. He had originally been cast as Lieutenant Boomer, but a roller skating accident that fractured his ankle led to his replacement in that role by Herb Jefferson Jr. Producer Glen A. Larson subsequently offered Carter the role of Colonel Tigh, second in command of the fleet, giving the series the distinction of featuring more than one regular African-American character in its principal cast. In 1999, Carter played CIA chief "Texas Slim" in the multinational Swedish action-adventure film Hamilton. He later held a recurring role in Hotel Caesar, Norway's most popular soap opera, as Solomon Tefari, an Ethiopian businessman and father of one of the main characters.

Alongside his acting work, Carter built a substantial career as a producer and director. In 1975 he founded Meta/4 Productions, Inc., a Los Angeles corporation through which he produced and directed industrial and educational presentations on film and videotape for federal clients including the National Endowment for the Arts and the Library of Congress, as well as for PBS. In 1979 he formed the Council for Positive Images, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to enhancing intercultural and interethnic understanding through audiovisual communication and within media, serving as its president. Under the council's auspices he produced and directed dramatic and documentary programs for PBS and worldwide distribution. In the 1980s he created, directed, and produced the television miniseries K*I*D*S, about a diverse group of teenagers confronting conflicts facing American youth of the era; the series received a Los Angeles Emmy in 1985. His 1988 PBS documentary A Duke Named Ellington, produced for the American Masters series and examining the life of jazz legend Duke Ellington, was nominated for the Emmy for Outstanding Informational Special.

Carter served two terms as a Governor on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. In 1983 he was inducted into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where he served on the foreign films committee and the documentary committee. In the early 1990s the United States Information Agency sent him on a goodwill tour of China to liaise with students and filmmakers there. He spent the final years of his career working in Scandinavia before retiring to New York City in 2013. Carter is survived by his wife Selome DeCoste, his two children Miguel and Melinda, Selome DeCoste's daughter, a granddaughter, and many cousins. He was twice widowed, preceded in death by his wives Anna DeCoste, to whom he was married from 1964 to 1990, and Beate Glatved DeCoste, to whom he was married from 1991 to 2006.