In 1990, Delta Burke was at the height of her fame thanks to her turn as Suzanne Sugarbaker on the hit show Designing Women. But by 1991, she’d left the show, reportedly over a high-profile disagreement with the show’s creator, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason.
While she continued acting off and on over the next 20 years, she eventually got sick of the endless tabloid scrutiny about her weight and mental health and left the spotlight altogether.
“I think she had had it with the tabloids and that dust up she had on Designing Women, and she got tired of all the stuff that goes with it,” Burke’s husband, actor Gerald McRaney, 77, tells PEOPLE.
“It’s sort of sad because she loved the process of acting, but it was all the stuff that went along with it that persuaded her maybe she should be better off not doing this,” he says.
In 2024, Burke, 68, did give a rare interview to author Chelsea Devantez on her Glamorous Trash podcast, where she admitted she was “emotionally too fragile” to deal with how “incredibly ugly” the narratives about her weight had become.
She recalled constantly being asked if she was pregnant, and one disturbing time when a fan “jerked” her coat open and said, “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 said on the podcast. “I’m just an actress, you know. I don’t have any power.”
Unlike his wife, McRaney has basically done the opposite of retire. In the past 20 years, he’s starred on shows like Deadwood, Longmire, This Is Us and House of Cards. Now he’s on the hit Hulu show Paradise.
“I think maybe I’m a little tougher about it,” he says of navigating press. But he can sympathize with Burke. “It does get to be annoying after a while when you read absolute lies about yourself. There’s very little you can do about that. At one time, you could sue them for it, but now you’ve got to prove that you actually lost money because somebody defamed your character.”
He adds, “I find that perfectly ridiculous. A person’s good name is a person’s good name, no matter whether it costs them money or not.”
McRaney says that his wife, whom he asked to marry on their second date, only came out of retirement to do the Glamorous Trash podcast because she’d liked Devantez’s memoir, I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This.
“I think it’s because Delta had read her book and identified with her,” he says. “I think she admired her, but she didn’t do it frivolously. She wrestled with the idea of doing it and eventually decided she had to.”
Will we be seeing more from Burke any time soon?
“There’ve been a couple times when her old agent, who is now a producer, has persuaded her to come out of retirement, but she will do it very reluctantly,” says McRaney.
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