David Jacobs, who has died aged 84, was an aspiring novelist when he created the show Dallas, a worldwide phenomenon and US television’s first peak-time soap success since Peyton Place. But the writer’s move to the screen was reluctant, made necessary by a need to earn money after his first marriage ended.
In 1975, Jacobs’s ex-wife, Lynn (nee Oliansky), a literary agent and producer whom he had married in 1963, moved from New York to Los Angeles following her second marriage, to the actor John Pleshette. Wanting to be close to his daughter, Jacobs went too and – according to an interview with the TV critic Hilary Kingsley – wrote to Lynn, who continued to be his agent, to ask: “At least can you find me some work? I don’t want to make a career in screen or television writing, just something that pays while I’m trying to write the adequate American novel.”
