Why to Donna Mills leave?

stevew

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Lots of strong women left soaps in 1989. I think Sue Ellen just ran out of story lines where she was fighting JR and Angela Channing was a health issue. Not sure why Maggie’s character ended on FC. And I’m guessing Donna Mills felt Abby had run her course too. Any comments as to why Donna Mills left?
 
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Monzo

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It was like like rats fleeing a sinking ship. I think every lady tried to save her career, thinking "If I stay until the end no one will care about me, so I'm leaving and might get a pilot for a new show." A few years ago Michael Weatherly left NCIS and his new show Bull got NCIS' lead-out timeslot. I guess that's every tv actor's dream and Donna Mills could have hoped for something huge, too.
 

Daniel Avery

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Donna Mills also chose to leave, as she wanted to do other projects, even forming her own production company to do TV movies and other things. She had played Abby for a long time, but it was hardly the case that she was "leaving a sinking ship". The show chugged along for several years without Abby, though of course it would have been fun to keep her around. KL was still strong enough to survive such a departure.
 

tommie

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I dunno
My guess is that it's both that the actresses were wanting/thinking about moving on and the shows needed to cut costs either way, so they just weren't going to stop them. It wasn't a Victoria Principal situation where they actually attempted to throw money at them to get them to stay on.
 

stevew

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Thanks for all the input. I wonder if Donna Mills had been handed FC, to walk in with Jane Wynan leaving, if she’d had considered it. I think replacing two strong females character with a male character was a bad idea. But moving Abby to Tuscany Valley could have been fun. But maybe that wasn’t what she was looking at. Idk.
 
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