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Terry Carter, who broke color barriers onstage and on television in the 1950s and \u201960s and later produced multicultural documentaries on the jazz luminary Duke Ellington and the dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham, died on Tuesday at his home in Midtown Manhattan. He was 95. <\/p>\n
His death was confirmed by his son, Miguel Carter DeCoste.<\/p>\n
Mr. Carter was raised in a bilingual home next door to a synagogue in a predominantly Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn. His best friend was the future jazz great Cecil Taylor<\/a>. In his first stage role, at 9, Mr. Carter played the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama on a voyage of discovery.<\/p>\n And in a wayfaring six-decade career, he was a merchant seaman, a jazz pianist, a law student, a television news anchor, a familiar character on network sitcoms, an Emmy-winning documentarian, a good will ambassador to China, a longtime expatriate in Europe \u2014 and a reported dead man; in 2015, rumors that he had been killed were mistaken. It was not him but a much younger Terry Carter who had died in a hit-and-run accident in Los Angeles by a pickup truck driven by the rap mogul Marion \u201cSuge\u201d Knight.<\/p>\n Slightly misquoting Mark Twain, Mr. Carter posted on social media: \u201cRumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n While he acted in some 30 television series and movies, Mr. Carter was best known to viewers as Sgt. Joe Broadhurst, the sidekick to Deputy Marshal Sam McCloud (Dennis Weaver) on NBC\u2019s \u201cMcCloud\u201d series from 1970 to 1977, and in 21 episodes of \u201cBattlestar Galactica,\u201d as Colonel Tigh, second-in-command of the starship fleet in ABC\u2019s original science-fiction series in 1978-79. (The series was revived for a second run from 2004 to 2009.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In the 1950s, when many American entertainments were racially segregated and hundreds of actors had been blacklisted during Communist witch-hunts by congressional investigators, Mr. Carter met the veteran actor Howard Da Silva, whose Hollywood and television career had stalled in 1951 after he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was Howard who talked me into becoming an actor \u2014 he\u2019s the one who changed my life,\u201d Mr. Carter said in an interview for this obituary in 2018. \u201cI quit law school and began studying at Howard\u2019s acting school. I think he called it the Mobile Theater Workshop.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Carter appeared in several Black-cast stage productions, both on Broadway and Off Broadway, before breaking into television as the only regular Black cast member on \u201cThe Phil Silvers Show\u201d (1955-59). He played Pvt. Sugie Sugarman in 92 half-hour episodes of the CBS comedy about an Army con man, Sergeant Bilko, and his motor pool crew.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The show was filmed before studio audiences in New York City. Memorized lines were occasionally flubbed, there were awkward pauses, and the actors often improvised to cover the gaffes, all of which created a spirit of camaraderie in the cast.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, I am the last living survivor of \u2018The Phil Silvers Show,\u2019\u201d Mr. Carter said in 2018. \u201cBut I\u2019m reluctant to take too much credit for being the only Black man on the show. I was only a cog in the wheel. I slew the foe, but I was just a ham like everybody else. It was a wonderful bunch.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1958, Mr. Carter co-produced an Off Broadway version of Tennessee Williams\u2019s \u201cA Streetcar Named Desire.\u201d The predominantly Black cast featured the actress Hilda Simms<\/a> as the faded Southern belle Blanche du Bois, and Black actors played Stanley and Stella Kowalski, while white actors filled smaller parts.<\/p>\n Mr. Carter starred with the British actress Sally Ann Howes<\/a> in \u201cKwamina,\u201d a 1961 avant-garde musical that explored the romance between a white female doctor and an African tribal chief\u2019s son. After previews in Toronto and Boston, it ran for 32 performances on Broadway. <\/p>\n Also in 1961, Mr. Carter appeared in the Hollywood film \u201cParrish,\u201d starring Claudette Colbert, Karl Malden and Troy Donahue in a Delmer Daves adaptation of a Mildred Savage novel about family conflicts on a tobacco plantation. And in 1965 he was the only Black actor to portray a G.I. in any of the 152 episodes of the World War II series \u201cCombat!,\u201d which appeared on ABC from 1962 to 1967.<\/p>\n After decades onstage and onscreen, Mr. Carter formed his own production company in 1975 and made educational documentaries. In the 1980s, he expanded into more sophisticated documentaries for PBS, the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Arts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 1988, his two-part documentary, \u201cA Duke Named Ellington,\u201d for the PBS American Masters Series, became the United States entry in television festivals around the world. Narrated and directed by Mr. Carter, it used recorded interviews with Ellington, who died in 1974, and filmed performances by his orchestra. It won CINE Golden Eagle and Golden Antenna awards and an Emmy nomination.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe went through about 70 hours of film footage, over 90 percent of which has never been seen before,\u201d Mr. Carter told The Times. \u201cGoing through this material was like discovering plutonium when you\u2019re searching for a common metal.\u201d<\/p>\n He also produced and directed \u201cKatherine Dunham: Dancing With Life,\u201d documenting the career of the dancer, choreographer and anthropologist who died at 96<\/a> in 2006. Described as a \u201cwork in progress,\u201d the film was screened in 2013 at Town Hall in Manhattan.<\/p>\n Terry Carter was born John Everett DeCoste on Dec. 16, 1928, in Brooklyn, the only child of William and Mercedes (Durio) DeCoste. His father was a handyman, and his mother managed the home. At home he learned Spanish and gained an appreciation for cultural diversity. He was an excellent student in public schools and graduated from the elite Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan in 1946.<\/p>\n Mr. Carter later joined the merchant marine and served on a ship that carried European war refugees to Latin America. He played piano with a jazz combo in Boston while attending Northeastern University, and studied law at St. John\u2019s University for nearly two years before turning to acting. (Returning to Northeastern, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree there in 1983.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n