“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.”
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.”
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 last 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 the finale of “All My Children” in January 2012, 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.”
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