Agnes Nixon dead: All My Children creator dies at 93

Agnes Nixon, the writer and producer best known for creating ABC’s One Life to Live and All My Children, has died. She was 93.

Nicknamed the Queen of Soaps, Nixon earned a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 2010 for her long and storied career in the daytime genre. All My Children ran for 41 years before it was canceled by ABC in 2011. (It went to air on the Online Network until 2013). One Life to Live premiered in 1968 and lasted until 2013.

Nixon also created the short-lived sudser Loving, which aired from 1983 to 1995. And if she didn’t create the soaps, she simply wrote for them: Her packed resume also includes stints on Another World, Guiding Light and Search for Tomorrow.

“The beauty of a soap, for me as a writer, is to go into the characters,” Nixon told EW in 2010. “I think daytime soaps are the form of entertainment that mirrors real life. It didn’t bother me because it just skimmed over what I write about – and I don’t mean to sound like an evangelist – which is sin and redemption. Not sin in a religious sense, but a person who can be bad, evil, whatever, and makes a turn. Nighttime can’t take the time and the depth to go into the characters’ makeup and what causes the drama that results.”

Nixon liked to appear in her soaps, too. She showed up as Agnes Eckhart in episodes of AMC and OLTL, and it was her hand that opened the book in the title sequence of AMC.

“I am devastated to learn that we have lost Agnes,” said AMC star Susan Lucci, who played Erica Kane, on Instagram. “I adored her and admired her and I am forever grateful to her! May this liveliest and loveliest of women rest in peace.”