“I did look back at that and I realize I was beautiful, I was gorgeous, and nobody said that. All they said was what a pig I was and this that and the other, which fed into my insecurities. I wish I had known — I wish that every young woman could know — she is beautiful. She’s got power and she doesn’t know because they don’t want you to know it.”

Burke said she was “emotionally fragile” and always struggled with her weight while doing the show, which ran on CBS from 1986 to 1993. Much of that was written into the series, including in the touchstone episode “They Shoot Fat Women, Don’t They?” Burke exited the series in a tumult with producers and abuse allegations, and after her option wasn’t picked up. She was trailed shortly by co-star Jean Smart, who went on to “Hacks” fame.

“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. I’m just an actress, you know. I don’t have any power,” she said. “I remember on the set, when it got to be really bad, and I wasn’t handling it well with a smiling face, my whole body language changed. I would kind of hunch over ... and I just tried to disappear.”

Burke said she had a breakdown and was hospitalized as early as the second season and said she didn’t want to go back to work on the series. So writer and co-creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, whom she worked with on “Filthy Rich,” agreed to write her “light” and help her character grow.

“It got ugly and very sad,” she said, and things grew contentious between them (“basically we tried to kill each other,” she said) even though they reunited later in another series.

“We do ‘Designing Women,’ and I’m so happy to be there,” she said. “I love everything. But then things started to change, which I won’t go into. But that combined with becoming famous, that I simply couldn’t cope with, and I wanted to leave and I wasn’t allowed to leave.”

Burke said she didn’t know what would have happened if she had been allowed to leave the series, but staying came with a few benefits: She loved seeing Suzanne evolve during her five-season run, embodying “an amazing character to get to play, grow older and fatter with.” She also wouldn’t have met her husband of 35 years: “Simon and Simon,” “Major Dad” and “This is Us” star Gerald McRaney, who appeared in the series.

“Sometimes I wonder, would I have been happier if I hadn’t done the show, but the thing is, I don’t know if I would have had a career or become well known for this fabulous character, but I wouldn’t have met Mac. So it was worth anything, whatever went down that was bad, it was worth [it] and we’re so happy to be here. “

“It just got too much for me, it got too ugly. The joy of acting left me. I was stunned, that’s what I am, I’m an actress, that’s what I identified [as] since 12 or 13. That really threw me, but it had been ruined by the ugliness that goes unfortunately with a lot of the business. I had removed myself from public life. “

That removal meant she wouldn’t accompany her husband to public events because she couldn’t put up with the “nonsense” that came along with it.

“I knew that I just wanted to stop so that’s what I did and [I] got out of L.A.,” she said, moving to Florida with her husband during the COVID-19 pandemic. “In our third act, I get to be in a place that makes me so happy. I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy or content... I love my life truly for the first time and I love him desperately. I know that I am safe and I’m loved. I didn’t feel that there.”

Unfortunately, she said, she never found anything creative to replace acting.

“So I’m just being me and I’m stuck in Hollywood. I was trying to be supportive to Mac and he was so wonderful and accepting that I can’t go out there with [him] anymore because that means the next day there’s going to be ugly pictures all over the internet with ugly stories and I can’t handle it. He was fine with that. And you’re getting older and you didn’t want to die in L.A. He’s from Mississippi and it’s sort of like salmon swimming upstream, and I remember getting in the car and I could smell the earth and I was home.”

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