Gloria Monty, who died Thursday at 84, was the veteran soap opera producer who took a dying franchise – “General Hospital” – and added glitz, youth, sex, and spun it into a delightfully trashy confection that became the hottest show on television in the early 1980s.

Within a year of taking the reins at “General Hospital,” as the industry and fans both call it, the show became ABC’s top-earner, and soap operas, transformed into action serials, suddenly became popular with younger audiences.

In 1981, a rapturous audience at Harvard greeted actor Anthony Geary, “General Hospital’s” slithery Luke Spencer, known for first raping, and then marrying, one of “General Hospital’s” most beautiful characters, Laura Faulker.

The marriage of Luke and Laura, with Elizabeth Taylor starring as a foul-mouthed guest at the wedding, became the most-watched episode in soap opera history.

The rape scene (“We prefer to call it a choreographed seduction,” Monty sniffed) was merely the most notorious of the outlandish plot twists Monty introduced. She abandoned the stock soap coffeeklatch heart-to-hearts (and even when a scene called for coffee, it was often replaced by herbal tea). She replaced them with characters back from the dead and evil scientists seeking to freeze the earth.

Older actors were given the boot in favor of glamorous youngsters like Rick Springfield, Demi Moore, John Stamos, and Emma Samms; each one owes Monty a substantial part of their career. The hospital at Port Charles suddenly received a gleaming, giant new wing. Wheezy organ music was replaced by up-tempo soul tunes. Every aspect of the production gleamed. Monty pioneered shooting soaps at remote locations, like Caribbean islands and Niagara Falls, and began shooting scripts out of sequence, like they do in the movies. “We blew up a whole mountain in Pacific Palisades,” she boasted to the Associated Press in 1988.

Monty’s audacity put “General Hospital” atop the daytime Nielsen ratings for a decade, but it was hardly an outsider’s shake-up, for Monty was among the pioneers of the form.

In 1950, she directed one of the earliest network soap operas, “The First Hundred Years” at CBS. Broadcast live, the show did not do well, but it paved the way for Monty’s first big success, “The Secret Storm,” which she directed for CBS from 1954-69.

At “The Secret Storm,” Monty’s plots tackled edgy topics like drugs and sexual abuse, but nothing close to what turned up on “General Hospital.”

Monty was born Gloria Montemuro, the daughter of an Italian immigrant contractor and a housewife who rejoiced in the name Concetta Mango. Together with her sister Norma, who later became a lead writer on “General Hospital,” Monty grew up in Bergen County, N.J., and attended the Academy of Holy Angels in Fort Lee. She attended New York University, intending at first to study medicine – “until I had to dissect a cat,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1986. She then earned a master’s degree in drama at Columbia. Like so many on screens large and small, her first love was the theater. She worked briefly at the New School, where she taught speech to Marlon Brando and Tony Curtis. She married fellow Columbia student Robert O’Byrne, and in 1946 they opened the Abbe Theatre School. The school’s directors were Monty and Dhimah, a purportedly Egyptian dancer who gave the program a some what exotic air. It was located in the CBS building and trained actors in improvisational techniques and mounted ambitious off-Broadway productions and also summer stock on Long Island. The school eventually foundered, and in 1950, Monty began directing and producing at CBS. Her husband became a writer at Sports Afield.

After leaving “The Secret Storm,” Monty produced and directed episodes of “One Day at a Time” and hour-long specials for CBS, and also worked briefly for NBC, before landing at ABC and “General Hospital.”

By the time that she was hired by Jacqueline Smith in 1977, Monty was that rarest of artists – a wildly successful veteran who wanted to shake things up. Mr. Geary, who has returned to “General Hospital” as a writer and actor in recent years, once told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about an early meeting with Monty.

“I told her, ‘I don’t really like soaps.’ She said to me, ‘Honey,neither do I. We’re going to change all that,'” Mr. Geary said.

To others, she was even more explicit. After her first weeks of watching the show in 1977, Monty told the Los Angeles Times, “The lighting was so bad, I thought, ‘My God, what ugly looking people. They should all get in an airplane and crash.'”

Monty left “General Hospital” in 1987, but returned in 1990, when the show had slipped into second place. This time her attentions were less successful, and she was gone within two years. Somehow, bringing Emma Samms back to life wasn’t enough anymore, and Monty’s idea of sending some characters downmarket to create an Upstairs/Downstairs dynamic flopped completely. Soap operas have never regained the buzz factor she gave them a quarter-century ago.

Monty, who was the model for a mother-hen producer in the film “Tootsie,” was physically tiny – just 5 feet 2 inches – but exercised a firm hand in the director’s booth and was known to break pencils and threaten to ruin careers of actors who crossed her. If she hadn’t existed,one of the other soap operas would probably have invented her.

Gloria Montemuro

Born August 12, 1921, in Union City, N.J.; died of cancer March 30 at her home in Rancho Mirage, Calif.; survived by her sister, Norma.