Irna Phillips,proclaimed by many as the mother or queen of the daytime serial or soap opera was born this day in 1901.

She was a complex character and much has been written about her. Without her we wouldn't be enjoying soaps today. She created many shows including today's As the World Turns and The Guiding Light. She was a co-creator of Days of our Lives and was a story consultant for the beginning of that show. You probably could name many others she created,including the much missed Another World.

William J. Bell and Agnes Nixon were two of her protge's so you could say she had some indirect influence on Y&R,B&B,AMC and OLTL.

She died on December 22,1973, a few months after she left ATWT.

It is a pity that a biography hasn't been written on this complex,talented televison pioneer!

There should be a documentary about her life and genius. It absolutely cannot be denied that without Irna, there would be no such thing called a soap opera, daytime drama, serialized melodrama, whatever you want to call it. It just wouldn't exist.

Irna was such a colorful character, really. Her wikipedia page says it all:

http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Irna_Phillips

My favorite excerpt:

"Irna was quoted as calling up her serial, As the World Turns, after an episode had aired that she did not particularly like. The receptionist answered the phone: "As the World Turns." Irna responded, "Not today it didn't!" and hung up the receiver."

Happy Birthday to her!

Irna Phillips is definitely the Mother of American soaps. Her influence extends beyond her own soaps into the Bell and Nixon soaps too, as well as on Days. So basically her influence is on every soap today, except Passions and GH. She's the creator of my three all-time favorite soaps: ATWT, AW, and GL.

That biography on Wikipedia is hilarious! I can't believe she fired Helen Wagner b/c she didn't like the way she poured coffee!

Also, I can't believe P&G would fire her for wanting to put Kim and Bob together. I guess it all worked out in the end b/c now they're finally together. So Irna was right all along.

It's people like Irna Phillips, Agnes Nixon, and Bill Bell that is what soap operas are missing today. TIIC now don't care about the genre, they have no respect for it. Soaps need people who can say when something is good, but also say when something is filth It's such a shame.

Speaking of not having a biography out of her, maybe I should do my History thesis on Irna Phillips. I know that her papers are at some university in Illinois?...it's in the Mid-West.

Her Chicago Tribune obituary is at my site.

Direct link: http://members.aol.com/jason47b/creators.html

Irna Phillips is definitely the Mother of American soaps. Her influence extends beyond her own soaps into the Bell and Nixon soaps too, as well as on Days. So basically her influence is on every soap today, except Passions and GH. She's the creator of my three all-time favorite soaps: ATWT, AW, and GL.

That biography on Wikipedia is hilarious! I can't believe she fired Helen Wagner b/c she didn't like the way she poured coffee!

Also, I can't believe P&G would fire her for wanting to put Kim and Bob together. I guess it all worked out in the end b/c now they're finally together. So Irna was right all along.

It's people like Irna Phillips, Agnes Nixon, and Bill Bell that is what soap operas are missing today. TIIC now don't care about the genre, they have no respect for it. Soaps need people who can say when something is good, but also say when something is filth It's such a shame.

Speaking of not having a biography out of her, maybe I should do my History thesis on Irna Phillips. I know that her papers are at some university in Illinois?...it's in the Mid-West.

LOL! Do it ! Then copy it on the site so we can all read it!

Here is some more about Irna:

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/P/htmlP/...phillipsirn.htm

According to this site,these are her creations:

TELEVISION

1952 The Guiding Light

1954 The Brighter Day

1954-55 The Road of Life

1956- As the World Turns

1964-99 Another World

1964-69 Peyton Place (consultant)

1965 Our Private World

1965- Days of Our Lives

1967-73 Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing

RADIO

Painted Dreams, 1930-32; Today's Children, 1932-38; The Guiding Light, 1937-52; The Road of Life, 1937; Woman in White, 1938; The Right to Happiness, 1939; Lonely Women, 1942, later became Today's Children, 1943; Masquerade, 1946-47; Young Doctor Malone, 1939-60; The Brighter Day, 1948-56.

It has been said that of all she created As the World Turns was her favorite!

I wonder what she would think of her show today?

I also like the story about her having a coloured episode of Guiding Light shot entirely in a bright hospital setting to make the coloured experiment look hideous. All because she didn't want to relinquish power over things she has no control over. This woman is one of a kind and a true legend.

Happy Birthday to the mother of soaps!

Here us her Bio from The Museaum of Broadcast Communications

The universally recognized originator of one of television's most enduring--and profitable--television genres, Irna Phillips is responsible for the daytime drama as we know it today. Her contributions to one format are unprecedented in television history. Television comedy had many parents-- Ernie Kovacs, Jackie Gleason; TV drama had early shapers in Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling, Reginald Rose and others. But the soap opera had only one mother and she was it. She founded an entire industry based on her techniques, beliefs and the ongoing, interlocking stories that she dreamed.

Born in Chicago in 1901, youngest of ten children, legend has it that Phillips endured her poverty-stricken, lonely childhood by reading and concocting elaborate lives for her dolls. When she started college she dreamed of an acting career but school administrators doubted that her looks would get her far. So she turned to teaching. After graduation, she taught in Missouri and Ohio for several years before returning to Chicago.

There she fumbled her way into a job with radio station WGN as a voice-over artist and actress. Soon after, the station asked her to concoct a daily program "about a family." Phillips's program Painted Dreams premiered on 20 October 1930. Dreams is usually recognized as the radio's first soap opera. It ran with Phillips both writing and acting in it until 1932 when she left WGN over an ownership dispute. At WGN's competition, WMAQ, Phillips created Today's Children which aired for seven years. Other highly successful dramas followed: The Guiding Light in 1937, The Road of Life in 1938, The Right to Happiness in 1939. By this time Phillips had given up acting to devote her time to writing. She had also sold the shows to national networks.

By 1943, just over ten years from her beginning, Phillips had five programs on the air. Her yearly income was in excess of $250,000 and her writing output was around two million words a year. It was at this phase that she developed the need for assistants to create dialogue for the stories she created. To keep her scripts accurate she also kept a lawyer and doctor on retainer.

Not one to put pen to paper, Phillips created her stories by acting them out as a secretary jotted down what she spoke. Her process of creating by assuming the identities of her characters was so successful it was later adopted by many of Phillips's protégés, including William Bell who would go on to create The Young and the Restless.

Phillips pioneered in radio many of the devices she would later put to successful (eventually cliched) use in television. She was the first to use organ music to blend one scene into the next. She was the first to employ cliff-hanger endings to keep audiences coming back and to develop the casual pace of these shows--she wanted the busy house wife to be able to run to the kitchen or see to the baby and not miss anything. She was the first to address social concerns in her storylines. She was also the first to shift the focus of serials from blue-collar to white-collar characters; under Phillips, doctors and lawyers became soap staples. In fact, hospital settings and stories about illness were vintage Phillips. A hypochondriac who visited doctors daily. Phillips brought her fascination with medicine to her work.

Other eccentricities influenced and contradicted her work. Though her shows were eventually produced in New York, Phillips refused to leave Chicago. She stayed involved in all aspects of her programs with frequent phone calls to the East. Surprisingly, Phillips, who based her stories on nuclear families, never married though late in her life she adopted two children.

When Phillips brought her creations to television (somewhat reluctantly), she brought all her devices with her. The Guiding Light premiered on TV in 1952. The Brighter Day and The Road of Life came to the small screen in 1954.

In the early 1950s, Phillips began a long association with Proctor and Gamble, longtime sponsors of soap operas. All Phillips shows, and all she would create, would be under the umbrella of Proctor and Gamble Productions.

On 2 April 1956, Phillips premiered what was to become her most successful (and some say favorite) show, As the World Turns. Until the 1980s phenomenon of General Hospital, it was the most successful soap in history. At its ratings peak in the 1960s, it was regularly viewed by 50% of the daytime audience. As the World Turns has broken much historical ground during its existence. It was daytime's first half-hour soap (previous shows lasted fifteen minutes). And it was the first to introduce a scheming female character: Lisa Miller, played by Eileen Fulton, used feminine wiles to catch unavailable men and generate havoc. The show's popularity even inspired a prime time spin-off; Our Private World aired for a few months in 1965.

In 1964, Phillips created daytime's Another World, TV's first hour-long soap and the first to broach the subject of abortion. (Phillips never shied away from controversy--when writing for the soap Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, she attempted to introduce an interracial romance. When the network balked, Phillips quit the show.)

Also in 1964, Phillips began working as a consultant on the prime time soap Peyton Place. Phillips now had control over shows running on all three networks. And in 1965, she created another long-lasting daytime drama Days of Our Lives.

But despite Phillips legendary golden touch and her importance to the daytime drama, by the 1970s the times and the genre were leaving her behind. Soaps were important profit centers for networks and they needed to become more sensational to keep ratings. Phillips's simpler stories were now out of fashion. She was fired by Proctor and Gamble in 1973 and died in December of that year.

Today daytime is populated with the programs she created: As the World Turns, Another World, Days of Our Lives, and The Guiding Light. Guiding Light has now set the record as the longest running series in broadcasting history. Many other soaps on the air were created by those who began their careers working for Phillips: Bill Bell and All My Children creator Agnes Nixon.

Phillips believed her success was based on her focus on character rather than on overly complicated plots and her exploration of universal themes: self-preservation, sex, and family. She said in 1965, "None of us is different, except in degree. None of us is a stranger to success and failure, life and death, the need to be loved, the struggle to communicate."

TELEVISION

1952 The Guiding Light

1954 The Brighter Day

1954-55 The Road of Life

1956- As the World Turns

1964-99 Another World

1964-69 Peyton Place (consultant)

1965 Our Private World

1965- Days of Our Lives

1967-73 Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing

RADIO

Painted Dreams, 1930-32; Today's Children, 1932-38; The Guiding Light, 1937-52; The Road of Life, 1937; Woman in White, 1938; The Right to Happiness, 1939; Lonely Women, 1942, later became Today's Children, 1943; Masquerade, 1946-47; Young Doctor Malone, 1939-60; The Brighter Day, 1948-56.

It has been said that of all she created As the World Turns was her favorite!

I wonder what she would think of her show today?

Until Douglas Marland's death, I'd say that the show stood in the direction that Phillips had wanted, especially since Marland worked w/ Agnes Nixon in the past and was one to stand up for himself (like when he quit GL). But since then...I think the show has gone further and further away from its roots. I think she'd be appalled that characters like Lisa and Kim don't get their own storylines.

Yeah, I think ATWT was her favorite too, especially since she was supposedly willing to let GL slip in the ratings in order to boost ATWT's.

I'm still trying to imagine how differently the show would have been if Phillips got her wish and Bob and Kim were married in 1972, instead of when they actually did.

I know that people often say that ATWT fan aren't as vocal as fans from other soaps (which I think is false b/c people base it on the internet, and not other factors), but after reading some of the stuff on the internet, the fans have done a lot of things in protest...especially things involving Lisa it seems. The last time I remember there being a huge uproar was about 10 years ago maybe when the show re-casted Conner Walsh.

This magnificent woman is like crack. I love her to pieces. She not only created my favorite genre, she was a true character. Some soap (I'm talking to ATWT) needs to do a tribute to her.

I imagine I'd run my own soap like she ran hers, iron fist and all. "Oh, hell, this woman gives Vagina Monologues? DISGRACEFUL. And FIRED! You mean to say, this--this Sonny person, THAT I CREATED, doesn't want a romance with an "older" woman? BEHEADED! Bring me my latte! NO FOAM! If I see foam I will smother your first born child!" Oh yes, good times.

LOL Darn!

She's like the Joan Crawford of soaps. Imagine her behind the scenes of today's soaps. "What the hell are you trying to tell me!? What the hell is...is this podcast? Absolutely not! We won't do them unless I can play each part! Yes, I can sound like a teenaged boy if I want to!"

On some soaps I imagine she'd ask where are the families? Where is the wise all knowing Grandfather, the loving mother,the tough as nails aunt,the gruff uncle with the heart of gold? Where are the scenes with the daughter talking to mom with grandpa close by telling mom he would have handled that differently? Where are the stories where every angle is presented,each story point is shown and every story has a moral to it.

Just my thoughts!

On some soaps I imagine she'd ask where are the families? Where is the wise all knowing Grandfather, the loving mother,the tough as nails aunt,the gruff uncle with the heart of gold? Where are the scenes with the daughter talking to mom with grandpa close by telling mom he would have handled that differently? Where are the stories where every angle is presented,each story point is shown and every story has a moral to it.

Just my thoughts!

Very good questions indeed. I highly doubt Irna would be too happy with where her soaps are at right now. Makes me wish she was still around to run things.

On some soaps I imagine she'd ask where are the families? Where is the wise all knowing Grandfather, the loving mother,the tough as nails aunt,the gruff uncle with the heart of gold? Where are the scenes with the daughter talking to mom with grandpa close by telling mom he would have handled that differently? Where are the stories where every angle is presented, each story point is shown and every story has a moral to it.

Just my thoughts!

That was both beautiful and sad (you know because it's true of some of what's missing on our soaps).

She's like the Joan Crawford of soaps. Imagine her behind the scenes of today's soaps. "What the hell are you trying to tell me!? What the hell is...is this podcast? Absolutely not! We won't do them unless I can play each part! Yes, I can sound like a teenaged boy if I want to!"

Hee and Exactly, All My Shadows.

Oh my--if you want a hilarious take on Irna Phillips PLEASE read Jase's celebration of her and her eccentricites HERE.

I cannot tell you how funny it is.