All My Children creator Agnes Nixon dies at 93

Agnes Nixon, the trailblazing soap opera writer and the creator of All My Children and One Life to Live, died Wednesday at a senior living facility in Pennsylvania. She was 93.

Nixon got her start in daytime serials thanks to her father's inadvertent assistance, the Los Angeles Times says. He was actually trying to convince her not to launch a writing career, hoping she would follow him into the burial garments business, when he set up a meeting with a pioneer in radio serial writing, Irna Phillips, to convince his daughter that her dream was foolish. But Phillips enjoyed Nixon's sample script so much, she asked her to come work for her. "It was one of the greatest moments of my life," Nixon said. "It was freedom."

During the 1950s and 1960s, Nixon helped launch As the World Turns, was head writer of Guiding Light, and helped turn around Another World. She was ahead of her time, giving a Guiding Light character in 1962 uterine cancer, but CBS and sponsor Proctor & Gamble agreed to let the storyline air only if the words "cancer," "uterus," and "hysterectomy" were not used. She later formed a company with her husband to produce One Life to Live, Loving, and All My Children; she based the latter show's villain, Adam Chandler, on her father, and gave Erica Kane, her favorite character, abandonment issues like she thought she had, the Times reports. In 1981, she became the first woman to receive the Trustees Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and in 2010, she was honored with a Daytime Emmy for lifetime achievement. Nixon's husband died in 1996. She is survived by her children Cathy, Mary, Robert, and Emily, and 11 grandchildren.

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