How Actress Delta Burke’s Longtime Love Gerald McRaney Saved Her From a Dark Depression

Delta Burke hit rock bottom when she was riding high. During her years on Designing Women, her depression became so severe, she wound up in her car, gobbling Xanax with a gun at her side, contemplating suicide. Luckily, she called her husband, actor Gerald McRaney, instead. “I didn’t know where I was, but he found me,” Delta says.

The couple, who will celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary on May 28, share one of Hollywood’s most supportive and endearing relationships. “I love my life truly for the first time. And I love him desperately,” says Delta, 67, who gives thanks to the This Is Us Emmy winner for his unconditional love. “No one had ever loved me completely for me, not even my mother or grandmother. They would judge what I looked like. He never did.”

Gerald, 76, met the Florida-reared actress when he did a 1987 guest appearance on Designing Women, where she played self-centered former beauty queen Suzanne Sugarbaker. Like her character, Delta started winning pageants when she was in high school. “This is similar between me and Suzanne — I love crowns,” she says. But Delta lacked the confidence that Suzanne seemed to possess in excess. “It took everything in me to play a character that thought she was so hot to start with,” confesses Delta. “I never thought I was good enough.”

Delta Burke Turned to Extreme Weight Loss Methods

Delta began taking diet pills while studying acting as a young woman in London, but eventually built up tolerance and they stopped working. A friend introduced her to methamphetamines while she was starring on the TV series Filthy Rich in the early 1980s. “Nobody knew about crystal meth at the time,” says Delta, who began mixing the highly addictive stimulant in her cranberry juice. “[I] wouldn’t eat for five days, and they were still saying, ‘Your butt’s too big.’”

Things got even more difficult when she became the breakout star of Designing Women a few years later. The attention in the press and the pressure on Delta to stay thin wore on her. “We do Designing Women, and I’m so happy to be there,” Delta recalls. “I love everything. But then things started to change — that combined with becoming famous, I simply couldn’t cope with.”

She began experiencing panic attacks during rehearsals. “My whole body would spasm,” she says of these frightening episodes. “Dixie [Carter] would get in the bed and lay beside me and pet me. And they would say how they loved me. … I was terrified it would happen in front of an audience.”

Delta gained more than 40 pounds while starring on the series — leading to tension with the show’s producers and mean-spirited headlines in the tabloids. “When I would be depressed in L.A., it would be, ‘Let’s just have one Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese after another,’” she says. “It wasn’t about being hungry. It was about something else.”

Her efforts to quit Designing Women were also rebuffed. “I wanted to leave, and I wasn’t allowed to leave,” says Delta, who weighed 215 pounds by the time she exited the show in 1991 at the end of the fifth season.

Delta Burke Found Lasting Love

Delta credits her husband, Gerald, whom she calls “Mac,” for helping her through this tumultuous period. She and the twice-divorced NCIS: Los Angeles star became very serious, very quickly. “I wasn’t going to let her get away,” says Gerald, who asked her to marry him on their second date.

Delta needed more time. “There’s never been a good, strong male figure in my life,” explains the actress, who never knew her father. The brother of a playmate molested Delta when she was 4, and she experienced harassment during her pageant days, leading her to mistrust most men.

Gerald bided his time. Their shared love of acting and the outdoors created a bond. His acceptance of Delta, no matter how much she weighed, convinced her to trust him. They wed two years after they met, in 1989. “I think the secret to a successful marriage in my case is to marry Delta Burke,” Gerald tells Closer. “I have done [marriage] twice before, so obviously I’m no good at it, but I think the key is who I have married.”

As in every union, it hasn’t been all smooth sailing, but they’ve tackled the big obstacles together. In 2004, Gerald sustained a knee injury while on a hunting trip in New Zealand. “My wife kept nagging me to go see somebody about it,” he recalls. When he finally went to a doctor, a chest X- ray revealed that he had stage 1 lung cancer. “That was on a Friday, and on Monday I was having surgery,” he says. “I tell people all the time that medical science, the grace of God, and a nagging wife saved my life.”

Delta had her own medical crisis four years later when the drugs she took for her depression stopped working. “I was on five medications,” she says. “I hadn’t gotten out of bed for two weeks. So we knew things weren’t working.”

Treatment and a doctor’s reevaluation helped Delta find her equilibrium again. During her stay in the hospital, she also began facing her lifelong problem with hoarding. “I’d always been way too ashamed,” admitted Delta, who at one point kept 27 storage units filled with everything from magazines and clothes to dinner rolls. “My mom had it,” says the star, who’s come a long way. “The stacks are getting better.”

Delta Burke Found Peace in Florida

Today, the couple make their primary home in Central Florida, where Delta was reared. “We’ll go fishing, shelling, go to the beach and things like that,” Gerald says about how they pass time together.

Delta has occasionally accepted new acting jobs, but she’s become disillusioned with the entertainment industry. “One day, it’s like the joy of acting left me,” she admits. “It had been ruined by the ugliness that goes, unfortunately, with a lot of the business. I just withdrew from the work because the joy was not there anymore.”

Gerald, however, would welcome the opportunity to share the screen with his beloved again. “I think as opposed to a lot of married people, we do better when we’re together 24/7,” he tells Closer. “I love when I get the chance to work with her. As I have said about her in the past, I would walk a mile in tight shoes to work with that lady. She’s so good.”

While it’s hard to say if there will be a role for Gerald in it, there is talk that CBS is working on a Designing Women TV movie that would reunite Delta with her former costars Jean Smart and Annie Potts. The rumored script would have their characters return to Atlanta for the funeral of Julia Sugarbaker, played by the late Dixie Carter.

For now, Delta is content to remain a private person sharing her life with the man she loves. “We’re both kind of weird. So it works out OK,” she says. “Sure, he gets weary because I’m never dull. But he loves me so much. I never expected to be so loved.”