“Troubles occupy many of our days, and moments of real happiness are rare. Show me a life full of happy endings, with no bits of unresolved plot left hanging in midair, where the meek always inherit the earth, and the devil gets his comeuppance, and I’ll show you the late show. Only Doris Day movies end when the boy gets the girl. In soap opera, as in real life, that is just the beginning of the story.”
-Irna Phillips,
“Every Woman’s Life Is A Soap Opera”, McCall’s Magazine, March 1965
A former speech teacher from Dayton, Ohio, who began her prolific writing career at WGN Radio in Chicago, Irna Phillips (b. July 1, 1901, d. December 23, 1973) was renowned for her forever-unresolved multithreaded plots. Having provided the genre with a template for repeated imitation, Irna was affectionately known as the “Queen of the Soap Operas”. Raised in a family of 10 children, Irna found it easy to write family stories. First introduced to Chicago broadcast audiences in 1930, Irna created, wrote & starred in “Painted Dreams”. This fledgling scriptwriter ultimately became a shrewd business personality because of a protracted legal dispute (which she lost) over the creative “ownership” of her first serial. To her immense credit, she went on to perfect the art of establishing beyond a legal doubt her rights to her own material. Although she originally typed all of her own manuscripts, she eventually hired a staff of multiple assistants to help with the daunting volume of scripts she composed each week. She dictated 6 scripts per day to various stenographers by sitting on the arm of a chair or by pacing back and forth acting out each part. In so doing, Irna was able to turn out 60,000 words per week and an astonishing 3,000,000 words per year! At the height of her production in the mid-1930s Depression Era, Irna earned a staggering one-quarter of a million dollars per year! She is credited with developing the content of modern soap opera. As a writer of daytime serialized fiction, Irna is said to have employed less exaggeration, less melodrama & less fantasy than her predecessors and/or contemporaries. That is, her storylines featured significantly more sophisticated concepts. While her colleagues adhered strictly to the concept of “good vs. evil” in their characterizations, Irna astutely observed complexities in people & wrote to those complexities. Irna explained, “You have to remember that there are always shades of gray with people; nobody is all good or all bad and each human being can exhibit all of these different elements often at the same time.” Striving to present what she saw as the ultimate goal of American women: a safe and secure family, the matriarch of “Today’s Children” (Phillips’ second soap) asserted, “The foundations of all dreams of all the men and women in the world are…love, family, home.” Irna Phillips left Chicago for New York in the late 1930s; she relocated to California in 1945. Besides creating Painted Dreams (1930-36, 1940) & Today’s Children (1932-38), Irna’s other radio credits include: The Road of Life (1937-59), The Guiding Light (1937-56), The Woman in White (1938-48), The Right to Happiness (1939-60), and The Brighter Day (1948-56). Irna Phillips’ television creations include: Guiding Light (1952-2009), As the World Turns (1956-2010), Another World (1964–1999), and Days of Our Lives (1965-present).
This collection of color coordinated fashion fabrics is from the Winter 2011 issue of Vogue Fabrics By Mail. Order a subscription to this swatch club catalog service to receive home delivery.
-Irna Phillips,
“Every Woman’s Life Is A Soap Opera”, McCall’s Magazine, March 1965
A former speech teacher from Dayton, Ohio, who began her prolific writing career at WGN Radio in Chicago, Irna Phillips (b. July 1, 1901, d. December 23, 1973) was renowned for her forever-unresolved multithreaded plots. Having provided the genre with a template for repeated imitation, Irna was affectionately known as the “Queen of the Soap Operas”. Raised in a family of 10 children, Irna found it easy to write family stories. First introduced to Chicago broadcast audiences in 1930, Irna created, wrote & starred in “Painted Dreams”. This fledgling scriptwriter ultimately became a shrewd business personality because of a protracted legal dispute (which she lost) over the creative “ownership” of her first serial. To her immense credit, she went on to perfect the art of establishing beyond a legal doubt her rights to her own material. Although she originally typed all of her own manuscripts, she eventually hired a staff of multiple assistants to help with the daunting volume of scripts she composed each week. She dictated 6 scripts per day to various stenographers by sitting on the arm of a chair or by pacing back and forth acting out each part. In so doing, Irna was able to turn out 60,000 words per week and an astonishing 3,000,000 words per year! At the height of her production in the mid-1930s Depression Era, Irna earned a staggering one-quarter of a million dollars per year! She is credited with developing the content of modern soap opera. As a writer of daytime serialized fiction, Irna is said to have employed less exaggeration, less melodrama & less fantasy than her predecessors and/or contemporaries. That is, her storylines featured significantly more sophisticated concepts. While her colleagues adhered strictly to the concept of “good vs. evil” in their characterizations, Irna astutely observed complexities in people & wrote to those complexities. Irna explained, “You have to remember that there are always shades of gray with people; nobody is all good or all bad and each human being can exhibit all of these different elements often at the same time.” Striving to present what she saw as the ultimate goal of American women: a safe and secure family, the matriarch of “Today’s Children” (Phillips’ second soap) asserted, “The foundations of all dreams of all the men and women in the world are…love, family, home.” Irna Phillips left Chicago for New York in the late 1930s; she relocated to California in 1945. Besides creating Painted Dreams (1930-36, 1940) & Today’s Children (1932-38), Irna’s other radio credits include: The Road of Life (1937-59), The Guiding Light (1937-56), The Woman in White (1938-48), The Right to Happiness (1939-60), and The Brighter Day (1948-56). Irna Phillips’ television creations include: Guiding Light (1952-2009), As the World Turns (1956-2010), Another World (1964–1999), and Days of Our Lives (1965-present).
This collection of color coordinated fashion fabrics is from the Winter 2011 issue of Vogue Fabrics By Mail. Order a subscription to this swatch club catalog service to receive home delivery.
