Leo's mom: How Days of our Lives' Diana Colville has changed through the years

The Diana Colville who Days of our Lives' Leo just visited is a shadow of her former 1980s self.

Once upon a time on Days of our Lives, a man calling himself Roman Brady fell for a spunky reporter named Diana Colville, played by soap legend Genie Francis. Diana first came to town as an old college friend of Mike Horton. It seemed that she would become Mike's new love interest, but they remained just friends through her entire original run.

The Diana we knew then was a full-fledged heroine who met and fell in love with the man calling himself Roman Brady. Today, we know that man as John Black, but at the time, he was living Roman's life and raising Roman's kids when he believed that Marlena was dead. Diana rescued one of those kids, Carrie Brady, when Carrie nearly drowned in a river. There was an immediate attraction between "Roman" and Diana as he helped her solve a mystery in Greece.

When they returned to Salem, "Roman" and Diana were in love. After a series of misadventures, they planned to marry, but it turned out Diana had been married before. At that point, Diana was running her family newspaper, the Spectator. However, she didn't want her fianc to learn that her husband, Cal Winters, had returned from the dead, so she sold the paper to Jack Deveraux.

Jack promised to keep her secret in return for ownership, but Cal didn't care and revealed himself at Diana's wedding. Diana proved that she was never legally married to Cal. Still, Cal wanted Diana to himself. When a fight ensued between "Roman" and Cal, Diana shot the man she loved but blocked the incident from her mind. She was devastated when she later remembered that she had been trying to kill Cal but had hit "Roman" instead. Wracked with guilt, Diana left town in 1989 and was barely spoken of again until 30 years later.

The next time DAYS fans saw Diana in 2019, she was played by Judith Chapman and was unrecognizable -- and not just because a new actress was in the role. This Diana seemed as if she'd never known a guilty moment in her life. She lied, she schemed, she manipulated, and she had no resemblance to the heroine who had loved John and his children with her whole heart.

Diana was a mother herself, and her son was none other than con artist Leo Stark, a.k.a. Matthew Cooper. However, we learned that Diana was a horrible mother who cared more about money and status than her own child. She even tried to make Leo and John believe they were father and son, but the truth soon came out. Leo was her abusive husband's son, a husband whom Leo had killed when he'd been a child.

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After Diana tried to kill Marlena with poison, she was sentenced to life behind bars. Leo recently visited his mom to confront her about the callous way she'd raised him, but Diana seemed more cold and twisted than she had in 2019. Will DAYS fans one day learn that Diana's life after skipping town in 1989 was more traumatic than we thought? Can that explain her personality change? Might DAYS have yet another case of dissociative identity disorder (DID) on its hands? There don't seem to be many logical explanations for why the Diana Colville of today is not at all like the Diana Colville of yesteryear.

Do you remember Diana Colville from the 1980s? Do you like this new version? We want to hear from you -- so drop your comments in the Comments section below, tweet about it on Twitter, share it on Facebook, or chat about it on our Message Boards.

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