Agnes Nixon, 93, who created ‘All My Children,’ ‘One Life to Live,’ dies

The grand dame of daytime television drama, Agnes Nixon liked to say that “everyone’s life is a soap opera.” For proof, she offered up her own.

She had an “abandonment complex” because her parents divorced soon after she was born. Growing up in an Irish-Catholic enclave in Nashville, Tenn., in the 1930s and 1940s, she felt painfully different because the other children all seemed to have fathers. Hers was “nearly psychotic” and schemed to crush her post-collegiate dream of being a writer.

He wanted his daughter to follow him into his burial garments business and arranged for her to meet Irna Phillips, a pioneering writer of radio serials her father was certain would “set me straight” regarding the foolishness of a writing career, Nixon often said.

And then Nixon invariably inserted a soap opera staple into the story — the plot twist. During the meeting, Phillips looked up from reading the sample script that was Nixon’s résumé and asked, “How would you like to work for me?”

“It was one of the greatest moments of my life,” Nixon later said. “It was freedom.”

Nixon, who went on to create such enduring daytime TV dramas as “One Life to Life” and “All My Children,” died Wednesday at a senior living facility in Pennsylvania. She was 93.

Although her characters were inevitably embroiled in melodrama, Nixon was repeatedly honored for elevating soaps during a television career that spanned more than 60 years. She pioneered socially relevant themes and dealt with them seriously, bringing attention to such once-taboo topics as racism, AIDS, lesbian relationships and teenage prostitution.

In 1962, Nixon wrote a story line for “The Guiding Light” on CBS about a character who develops uterine cancer and has a life-saving hysterectomy. The network and show sponsor Proctor & Gamble agreed to the plot only if the words “cancer,” “uterus” and “hysterectomy” were not used.

“I thought, well, hmmm, that’s a little tough,” Nixon told National Public Radio in 2010, so she had the doctor tell the patient that she had “irregular cells, rather than possible cancer. … It was very successful, and that hooked me.”