Tulsi from kyunki saas. Smriti Irani quit show after 7 years due to differences with Ekta and Ekta got in a Gautami Kapoor to play Tulsi, everyone anticipated ratings to fall because she was the face of Tulsi but it had no impact. Bani was name of lead in Kasam se , another show on Zee with Ram Kapoor and Prachi Desai, Prachi quit it in between because she wanted to pursue Bollywood , they got Gurdeep Kohli to play Bani.
More recent example, Dheeraj quit Kundali and Shakti was roped in to play same character.
Khair those shows actor actresses actually quit. But still the writers never showed character actually died, kept it suspense, just revealed later that they were same character. Here actress is still there but they forcefully ended character (this happened in Rishta gen 2 but that was because they were planning for 3rd gen with 2 sisters from different mothers plus Kaira had run their course with no more scope to explore, they got nearly everything an itv ship could get). I am not advocating for them to replace the actors in case anyone misunderstands and jumps me..just saying if you are struggling for ratings killing your lead character permanently is a terrible strategy to boost it.
comment:
p_commentcount