Legendary star Terry Carter, who broke all color barriers on television in the 1950s and 60s and later produced multicultural documentaries on the jazz luminary Duke Ellington and the dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham, died on Tuesday, April 23, at this home in Midtown Manhattan.
He was 95-year-old and his death was confirmed by his own son, Miguel Carter DeCoste.
Terry Carter was raised in a bilingual home next door to a synagogue in a predominantly Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn. Jazz great Cecil Taylor was his best friend. In the initial stage role, at the age of 9, Carter played the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, depicted on a voyage of discovery.
And in a wayfaring six-decade career, he was a merchant seaman, a jazz pianist, a television news anchor, a law student, an Emmy-winning documentarian, a familiar character on network sitcoms, a goodwill ambassador to China, and a dead man in 2015 as per the rumors that he had been mistakenly killed. However, it was not him but a much younger Terry Carter who had died in a road accident in Los Angeles by a massive truck driven by the rap mogul Marion Suge Knight.
There was a time when he acted in over 30 films and television series; Terry Carter was best known to audiences as Sgt. Joe Broadhurst, the sidekick to deputy Marshal Sam McCloud on NBC’s “McCloud” series from 1970 to 1977. Moreover, in 21 episodes of “Battlestar Galactica,” as Colonel Tigh, second-in-command of the starship fleet in ABC’s original science-fiction series in 1978-79.
In his long career, Mr. Carter has appeared in several Black-cast stage productions, both on Broadway and off Broadway, before breaking into television as the only Black character on “The Phil Silvers Show”. Further, playing Pvt. Sugie Sugarman in 92 half-hour episodes of the CBS comedy about an Army con man, Sergeant Bilko, and his motor pool crew.
In Terry Carter’s long and beautiful career he has performed various roles which will remind us of his presence in our hearts forever.
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