Kate Mansi Wraps Up Her Days of Our Lives Run

Days of Our Lives is about to be short a leading lady, and it may leave a big hole.

According to Daytime Confidential, Kate Mansi (Abigail) is exiting the sudser sometime during the month of May.

Abigail is right in the middle of a big storyline, and there's no telling how her absence will affect the people who love her most, especially her immediate family.

Fans may be shocked or angry by Abigail's exit, since it could be similar to how she was written out last time Mansi left in 2016.

Just like now, Abigail was hospitalized in 2016 because she kept hallucinating about Ben being around and ready to attack her, and ended up confined to a mental hospital...except she ran away and then asked Andre to help her fake her death in a plane crash.

It was a terrible exit that served as an excuse to keep the character off-screen while the showrunners searched for a replacement.

And now it might happen all over again since Abigail is again in the hospital suffering from hallucinations about bad guys attacking her.

And this time, as far as we know, Days of Our Lives isn't recasting, so if Abigail disappears, that may be the end of the character, at least for a while.

Recasts are controversial -- not all fans took to Marci Miller when she took over the role for a year in between Mansi's two runs. But without someone else coming in, Chad, Jack, and Jennifer may be left in limbo wondering where Abigail is and never finding her.

Besides, Kate Mansi was hardly the first person to play Abigail.

Various child actors played Jack and Jennifer's little girl until 2004, at which time Ashley Benson was chosen to play the teenaged version of Abigail.

But Mansi took over the role for the first time in 2011, departing in 2016 and then returning again in November of 2019 after Marci Miller declined to renew her contract, and for some fans, she is the only Abigail that will do.

Her version of Abigail is as controversial as she is popular. Some of the credit for that goes to the writers, of course -- actors don't make up their own storylines -- but she definitely made the character her own... and her version of Abigail often makes bad decisions, especially when it comes to men.

During her first run, she tricked a drunk Austin into thinking he'd slept with her and pursued an affair with EJ Dimera while he was engaged to Sami Brady.

Yet she tried to be a good sister to JJ and drove him nuts with her judgmentalism after he stopped smoking weed and tried to turn his life around.

By the time Mansi left the first time, Abigail's character had been changed, and instead of being sex-obsessed, she was severely mentally ill.

That wasn't a great development, considering how poorly Days of Our Lives treats mental health issues, but when Mansi returned to the canvas, Abigail was struggling to prove she was no longer suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder and had ruined her friendship with Gabi because of her disease.

That's why so much of her second run revolved around a seemingly endless fight to get Gabi out of Dimera Enterprises and Chad back in the driver's seat at the company.

Those were not great storylines for Abigail, especially since they were so redundant. But Mansi also had a chance to shine when Abigail's supposedly-dead father returned to Salem in the beginning of 2019.

Abigail and Jack were always close, but Jack's inability to remember his family and his insistence on rejecting Jennifer in favor of Eve hurt Abigail so deeply that she left town for a while... only to have more problems in Paris thanks to a newly-divorced Austin renewing his interest in her and Chad's assistant being determined to bed him.

Viewers were lucky to be able to see these storylines via a web series on NBC's website. They were more interesting than anything that happened between Abigail and Gabi once Abigail returned to Salem!

Abigail's latest exit from Salem will leave Jack and Jennifer without any children on set, as JJ moved to Africa after attending his grandfather's funeral there in February 2020. That DEFINITELY leaves a hole in their lives, but will the writers explore it?

Your turn, Days of Our Lives fanatics. Hit that big, blue SHOW COMMENTS button and let us know how much you'll miss Abigail, how you think she'll be written out, and who you think will be most affected by her absence.

Want to chat more about Days of Our Lives? Check out our Days of Our Lives reviews and Days of Our Lives Round Table discussions.

Days of Our Lives airs on NBC on weekday afternoons. Check your local listings for airtimes.