Agnes Nixon - Writer, TV Producer

Agnes Nixon - Radnor Township

Agnes Nixon is a writer and producer best known for her soap operas, All My Children, One Life to Live, and Loving. She has lived in Radnor for more than 28 years.

She began her career in "soaps" as a writer on Woman in White, As the World Turns, Search for Tomorrow, Guiding Light and Another World, where she created the character of Rachel Davis, an early prototype of one of her more lasting creations, Erica Kane played by Susan Lucci.

Agnes Nixon began addressing social issues in 1962 after a friend died of cervical cancer. She wrote the struggle into Guiding Light and had difficulty with certain words that could not be used on TV such as "uterus", "cancer" or "pap test”. Despite this limitation, the number of women who took a pap smear surged dramatically.

In 1970, Nixon got the green light for All My Children, a soap opera that addressed social issues such as the anti-war movement, homosexuality, AIDS and American television's first onscreen abortion, by character Erica Kane.

In 1983, Nixon began a series called Loving, a show that ended its run in 1997.

In 1992, Agnes Nixon was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame, and in 2010 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Ms. Nixon died in September 2017 in Rosemont, PA from pneumonia resulting from Parkinson’s disease.