Agnes Nixon, 'Queen Of Modern Daytime Drama,' Dies At 93 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Chris Pizzello/AP Chris Pizzello/AP 
 
 Soap opera pioneer Agnes Nixon, who created All My Children and One Life to Live, has died at the age of 93. She is known for highlighting challenging and taboo social issues through daytime television. 
 
 Her son Bob Nixon told The Associated Press that she died at a physical rehabilitation facility in Haverford, Pa. 
 
 Nixon "was one of the few powerful women in television in the 1960s and 1970s," NPR's Neda Ulaby told our Newscast unit. And as she was presented with the 2010 Daytime Emmys Lifetime Achievement Award, All My Children actress Susan Lucci called her the "queen of modern daytime drama." Actor Cameron Mathison said, "Without her, there would be no daytime." 
 
 She is also widely credited with shining a light on issues such as homosexuality, AIDS, interracial relationships and abortion in her storylines. "Agnes was probably the first one in television to deal with socially relevant issues," All My Children executive producer Julie Hanan Carruthers said during the 2010 Daytime Emmys ceremony. "She's not only taught the audience tolerance, but acceptance." 
 
 Nixon reflected on her writing in a 2010 interview with Morning Edition. "I wasn't trying to change the genre, I was just trying to write what I thought, what was interesting to me," she said. 
 
 She explained that the first social issue that she wove into a storyline was uterine cancer after a friend died of the disease. She wanted women to know about Pap smears, and said her storyline proposal was initially met with resistance from the owner and network of Guiding Light (one of the other programs for which she wrote). But they eventually allowed her to do the show. "That hooked me," Nixon said. "That made me realize, gee, we could do something." 
 
 Nixon described homosexuality as the last "holdout" issue on television. Almost 20 years ago, she decided that Bianca, the daughter of All My Children lead character Erica Kane, would be a lesbian: 
 
 "When we did Bianca, we made the audience love her, and respect her. We knew we had to make the lesbian a daughter of a popular character. And of course we let the audience know first before Erica did, so everyone was waiting to see how Erica would react. And that character, Bianca, became the most popular woman on daytime. I thought that was the last thing that I could think of. If you can think of something else, send me a postcard." 
 
 Agnes Nixon: A Soap 'Goddess' On Getting Serious In The Afternoon Agnes Nixon: A Soap 'Goddess' On Getting Serious In The Afternoon Listen · 7:19 7:19 
 
 As The Associated Press reported, both shows were canceled by ABC in 2011. "All My Children had aired for nearly 41 years, while One Life to Live had made it to 44 seasons," according to the wire service. 
 
 Throughout that time, Nixon wrote episode after episode. She described her process to Morning Edition: ||||| Agnes Nixon arrives at the Daytime Emmy Awards in Las Vegas in 2010. (Chris Pizzello/AP) 
 
 In 1962, daytime television viewers were treated to a shocking story — a pivotal, historic moment for the medium. 
 
 At the time, as Deadline noted, Agnes Nixon, the chief writer for “Guiding Light,” wanted to write a plot line in which its character Bert Bauer is diagnosed with uterine cancer after waiting too long to undergo a Pap smear. 
 
 But she wasn’t allowed to use the words “cancer,” “uterus” or “Pap test.” 
 
 Somehow, she pulled it off what is considered the first health story line in a daytime drama. And it paid off — thousands of women wrote in to thank her for letting them know the importance of such a test. 
 
 In 1968, Nixon shared part of one such letter in the New York Times. It came from a Santa Barbara, Calif., woman, and it read, “Like Bert, I had not gone to my doctor in twelve years. After what happened to her I did go for a Pap test and found that I, too, had uterine cancer. I have now had a hysterectomy, am feeling wonderful and I want think you for saving my life.” 
 
 In 2002, she received a Pioneer for Health Award by Sentinel for Health for the episodes. 
 
 This was just one of the many informative, progressive moments created by Nixon and neatly fitted into a soap opera. In her career, she would tackle child abuse, AIDS, racial segregation, racism, abortion, addiction and the Vietnam War in the two soaps she created: “All My Children” and “One Life to Live.” 
 
 All after honing her TV skills on as a writer on shows like “As the World Turns” and “Guiding Light.” 
 
 Nixon died on Wednesday at the age of 93 in Haverford, Pa. 
 
 It’s arguable that soap operas had long been subtly political, a counterpoint to feminism. Even in the early soaps Nixon worked on, she was creating mostly escapist fantasy for housewives, as the New York Times noted. 
 
 That was no secret to those working on the shows, either. 
 
 Irna Phillips, creator of “As the World Turns” and “Guiding Light” and Nixon’s mentor, explained this in the New York Times in 1968 when discussing the success of the former show. 
 
 “[Character Nancy Hughes] finds her happiness within her home and herself, and she believes that this is woman’s true function. Nancy is my answer to the ‘feminine mystique.’ ‘Why,’ she once asked, ‘do I need to go out and prove myself at a political rally?’ I believe that ‘As the World Turns’ is successful because millions of women are against the ‘feminine mystique,’ and Nancy is their spokeswoman.” 
 
 But Nixon pushed against the norm, first by guiding the Pap smear episodes then by creating “One Life to Live” and “All My Children.” 
 
 These shows would feature gay characters, transgender characters, characters with AIDS and alcoholism and drug addiction, characters who abused children or were abused as children. 
 
 But, perhaps because of soap’s escapist origins, the shows — and their creators — got little respect. 
 
 In a screed against this, Nixon wrote in the New York Times in 1968, “The syndrome persists that soap opera is a Never-Never Land where hack writers and their inferior producers, directors and actors serve melodramatic pap to a lunatic fridge of female children who grow older but never grow up.” 
 
 In that piece, she discussed the Pap smear episode: 
 
 The soap opera has been able to do stories which have performed a public service to the national community in a way which no other kind of television entertainment could achieve. 
 
 She also held herself and the rest of the industry accountable for the lack of black actors in soap operas, writing: 
 
 It would be fatuously dishonest to pretend that daytime soap operas have, in the past, done as much toward providing jobs for Negro actors as they should. There have always been some parts played by Negro actors over the years but certainly when compared with the number of white parts and the degree of involvement in the story, it could not help but appear as a token gesture, no matter how sincere individual attempts to improve the situation may have been. 
 
 So she cast two black actors in the lead of “One Life to Live.” 
 
 It still didn’t earn her immediate respect. 
 
 A year later, in an article explaining that with a six-figure salary, Nixon was one of the highest compensated writers in television, the New York Times — the same publication in which she wrote that scathing op-ed — referred to her as a “Philadelphia Main Line house-wife-writer.” 
 
 But, as she told the New York Times after “One Life to Live” aired with its prominent black actors: “I’m not afraid. I introduced the theme of racial integrations into my last show — “One Life to Live” — and, while a Texas station canceled the show, we received far more compliments than complaints.” 
 
 “On the social issues, whether the Vietnam War or abortion or racism, I never thought I could change the way most people felt,” Nixon told the magazine America in 2002. “I just wanted to show the unfairness of it, the inequality, the injustice.” 
 
 The article’s first paragraph was, “The day time television serial, or soap opera, is in the process of going activist.” 
 
 For Nixon, it had gone “activist” years before. The critics simply hadn’t noticed. ||||| Like their predecessors, the new Nixon soaps were disturbing, fascinating and addictive. Because she presented various sides of a controversy, they were more complex. But she tried to avoid preachy dialogue, letting action and plot speak for themselves. The conundrum was no longer simply whether Tara was pregnant, but whether Phil, home from Vietnam and scarred by the horrors of war, could still love her. 
 
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 Many Nixon stories were based on reality. In 1964, after a friend died of cancer, she created a “Guiding Light” character who was found, after a Pap smear, to have cervical cancer. Despite misgivings by the sponsor, Procter & Gamble, the character appeared onscreen, though the words “cancer,” “uterus” and “hysterectomy” were never uttered. Even so, thousands of women wrote in to express gratitude for the information that a simple test might save their lives. 
 
 On “One Life to Live,” which began in 1968 and ran for 43 years, Ms. Nixon created a tale that reflected the nation’s changing social structures and attitudes. It had many ethnic characters, including Jews, Polish-Americans and African-Americans. A woman assumed to be white was revealed after months to be a light-skinned black, turning the story, and the audience, sharply to questions of racial prejudice. 
 
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 Ms. Nixon’s revolutionary changes were widely copied by other soaps and other networks, and helped capture new audiences at a time when the traditional base of daytime viewers — 20 million to 30 million daily, the vast majority of them homemakers — was being eroded by women entering the work force. Increasingly, men and college students drawn by their topicality were tuning in. 
 
 “It was a kind of first,” Lewis Antine, a graduate student at the City University of New York, told The New York Times after watching a 1974 episode of “All My Children” featuring a Vietnam War veteran. “It was a sense of your stuff being on TV for the first time, like, ‘Hey, they’re talking about us on Mom’s show.’” 
 
 Ms. Nixon was an unlikely source of tales of infidelity and divorce, let alone racial and antiwar conflicts. The mother of four children, she was married to the same man for 45 years. And she wrote not in the caldron of New York or glitzy Hollywood, but in her suburban home in Rosemont, on the Philadelphia Main Line. (She died in a nursing facility in Rosemont.) 
 
 Rosemont and adjoining Bryn Mawr, Pa., were the prototype for Pine Valley, the setting for “All My Children,” which had its premiere in 1970 and ran for 41 years. (For that entire time, its best-known cast member was Susan Lucci, one of daytime TV’s best-known and highest-paid stars, as Erica Kane.) In 1973, a character on the show was the first on television to have a legal abortion after the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. The show also tackled drug addiction, depression, child abuse and AIDS. In 2000, it introduced a lesbian character, who shared the first lesbian kiss on a soap opera. In 2007, a transgender character appeared. 
 
 “Life is fascinating,” Ms. Nixon told The Milwaukee Sentinel in 1983, “and if you look at your family and your friends and you have a writer’s viewpoint, you can see each person’s life as a soap opera in itself. The really amazing thing is they are basically similar.” 
 
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 She was born Agnes Eckhardt in Chicago on Dec. 10, 1922, the only child of Harold and Agnes Dalton Eckhardt. Her parents were separated when she was an infant. She and her mother moved to Nashville, where she attended St. Cecilia Academy, a Roman Catholic prep school. She studied writing at St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Ind., and attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. 
 
 Her father, who manufactured burial garments and paid for her education, wanted her to join his firm. He tried to dissuade her from a writing career by arranging a talk with Irna Phillips, a well-known creator of radio soaps and serials. The tactic backfired. After reading a script she had written, Ms. Phillips offered her a job in New York. She began in 1948, writing radio scripts for a hospital drama, “Woman in White.” 
 
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 In 1951, she married Robert Henry Nixon, an auto dealer who later gave up his business to join his wife in a television production company. He died in 1996. 
 
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 She is survived by their three daughters, Cathy Chicos, Mary Nixon and Emily Nixon; their son, Robert; 10 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. 
 
 In the early 1950s, Ms. Nixon wrote for major dramatic programs, including “The Philco Television Playhouse,” “Robert Montgomery Presents” and “The Hallmark Hall of Fame.” She eventually succeeded Ms. Phillips as lead writer for “The Guiding Light.” She was the head writer for the NBC soap opera “Another World” from 1965 to 1967. 
 
 For decades, the lucrative advertising revenues of Ms. Nixon’s best-known creations, “One Life to Live” and “All My Children,” helped support ABC’s evening programming. But in the 1990s, the popularity of all soaps fell steadily as cable networks and the internet provided new sources of entertainment, and after 2000 their audiences and revenues went into steep declines. 
 
 In 2008, Ms. Nixon appeared on the 40th-anniversary episode of “One Life to Live,” and the 10,000th episode of “All My Children.” Both shows, with only 2.5 million viewers a day each, were canceled in 2011. 
 
 Fans bombarded ABC with protests and petitions and picketed network affiliates. An online production company, Prospect Park, offered a reprieve, announcing plans to continue both programs, with Ms. Nixon’s participation, online. The plans were delayed, suspended and revived as union and financing problems arose and were resolved. Both shows went into production in 2013 and were available via Hulu and iTunes, but they lasted only a few months before being canceled that November. 
 
 Because of both her success and her longevity, Ms. Nixon was often called the queen of the modern soap opera. From the premiere of “One Life to Live” in 1968 to its finale in January 2012 (four months after the last episode of “All My Children”), shows she had created or had a hand in writing, producing or shaping as a consultant were on the air every weekday for 43 years — more than 11,000 days. 
 
 The recipient of many awards, including a Daytime Emmy for lifetime achievement in 2010, Ms. Nixon often spoke of soap operas as ensembles and would share credit with actors, directors, producers, camera crews and other writers. Her own contributions, she said, had no unrealistic objectives. 
 
 “On the social issues, whether the Vietnam War or abortion or racism, I never thought I could change the way most people felt,” she told the Catholic magazine America in 2002. “I just wanted to show the unfairness of it, the inequality, the injustice.” ||||| “I am devastated to learn that we have lost Agnes,” said Susan Lucci, veteran of 1,000-plus episodes of “All My Children,” in the wake of daytime drama pioneer Agnes Nixon’s passing Wednesday at age 93. 
 
 Posting a picture on Instagram of herself with Nixon, the actress best known as Erica Kane continued: “I adored her and admired her — and I am forever grateful to her! May this liveliest and loveliest of women rest in peace.” 
 
 Obituary: Daytime-drama pioneer Agnes Nixon dies at 93 » 
 
 Nixon was “a true trailblazer,” tweeted “The Young and the Restless” actress Melissa Claire Egan. 
 
 Lucci, Egan and others in the soap opera community, both in front of the camera and behind it, were pouring their hearts out on social media once news of the “One Life to Live” and “All My Children’s” creator’s death began to spread. 
 
 https://www.instagram.com/p/BK6Z1yngr2K/ 
 
 https://twitter.com/MClaireEgan/status/781250725636546560 
 
 Nixon was “a force of nature,” said Dena Higley, head writer for “Days of Our Lives.” 
 
 https://twitter.com/DenaHigley/status/781232316022558721 
 
 “General Hospital” executive producer Jack Valenti expressed his condolences, and “GH” script coordinator C.J. Hoke offered context for Nixon’s achievements. 
 
 https://twitter.com/valentinifrank/status/781227722815205376 
 
 https://twitter.com/rainbowspy/status/781251832240828416 
 
 Actress Alicia Minshew played Kendall Hart on “One Life to Live” and more than 950 episodes of “All My Children.” Actor Scott Evans appeared on 137 episodes of “One Life to Live,” from 2008 into 2010. Cady McClain has been on “As the World Turns,” “All My Children” and “The Young and the Restless.” 
 
 https://www.instagram.com/p/BK6cYnKgx7V/ 
 
 https://twitter.com/thescottevans/status/781238007898710016 
 
 Carrie Genzel appeared on “All My Children” and “Days of Our Lives” in the ’90s. Jean Passanante served as a writer on “All My Children,” “As the World Turns,” “One Life to Live,” “The Young and the Restless” and “General Hospital.” 
 
 Wendy Riche executive produced “General Hospital” and “Port Charles” in the ’90s. 
 
 https://twitter.com/carrie_genzel/status/781216500627628033 
 
 https://twitter.com/canyoncatz/status/781242041044836352 
 
 https://twitter.com/PFossil/status/781246617399812098 
 
 Follow Christie D’Zurilla on Twitter @theCDZ.
– Agnes Nixon, the woman who helped create the soap opera as we know it, is dead at age 93. Nixon rose to prominence during the '60s and '70s, and NPR describes her as one of the only powerful women in the entertainment industry during that era. Just like Nixon herself, two of her more famous creations were well-loved and and long-lived: All My Children ran for over four decades, while One Life To Live aired for 44 seasons. Both ended in 2011. Nixon was well-known for using her shows to draw attention to controversial social issues. Her plots addressed everything from cancer to abortion to homosexuality, issues often elided by many TV shows of the era. As the New York Times notes, Susan Lucci's character on All My Children was the first on TV to have a legal abortion—in 1973, just after Roe v. Wade. "I wasn't trying to change the genre, I was just trying to write what I thought, what was interesting to me," Nixon told NPR in 2010. The Washington Post asserts that she "quietly made soap operas relevant," noting that a story line she wrote about a Guiding Light character's uterine cancer in 1962 is considered the first health plot in a daytime drama. Alumni of her shows have responded to Nixon's death with an outpouring of love, support, and admiration, notes the Los Angeles Times, which rounds up examples of the tributes to the woman known as "Amazing Agnes." Lucci, for instance, writes that she is "devastated" but "forever grateful." Nixon died of pneumonia, a complication of her Parkinson's disease.