Shannen Doherty was just 19 years old when she made her acting debut in the lead role of Brenda Walsh on "Beverly Hills, 90210," but she's already lived an entire acting narrative.
As a child star, she began her career with full-fledged roles as Jenny Wilder in "Little House on the Prairie" and Chris Witherspoon in two seasons of the family drama "Our House," the Guardian reports.
After playing a string of similar characters in the 1980s, it was her supporting role in the 1989 teen black comedy "Heathers" that showed she had a wide range. There she played a scheming mean girl more obsessed with her looks and social standing than anything resembling human dignity.
When she appeared on 90210 in 1990, she was about to play that role again as Brenda Walsh, and was probably completely unaware of the life-altering consequences that were to come. Arriving in the belly of the Minnesota California beast along with her brother Brandon, Brenda makes numerous naive and moralistic choices over the course of the show's first season. But in the fourth - Doherty's final season - she emerges as a complex and problematic young figure, perceived by many as the prototypical "bad girl."
As Doherty gained mainstream popularity for playing easy-to-hate characters, she became the subject of intense public scrutiny and a host of startling accusations: an allegation by her one-time fiancé and Max Factor heir Dean Factor that she tried to kill him, reports of a disgustingly extravagant lifestyle, and allegations of confrontations and physical altercations with her colleagues on set.
At the time, even many fans of Doherty's character from 90210 were outraged; Darby Romeo and Karyn Morataya set up a national "I Hate Brenda" newsletter with a hotline people could call to express how much they hated Walsh.
In 1993, in an article for the Chicago Tribune, Morataya made a common criticism that seemed to unite Walsh and Doherty, complaining of the former, "We love everyone else on the show except her. We hate her. She pretends to be a moralist. In reality, she's not."
In retrospect, it's easy to see that Brenda Walsh, and by extension Shannen Doherty, had become, to borrow the phrase of podcast host and writer Sarah Marshall, one of the most maligned women of the 1990s: a victim of sexism and misogyny who had reached dizzying heights of celebrity before she was even old enough to legally drink.
Willingly or not, she became a repository of the public's emotions at a time when young women aspired to greater personal and bodily autonomy.
Much of Doherty's life after 90210 is colored by those tumultuous years. After scoring yet another hit role as the witch Prue Halliwell in the action drama Charmed, Doherty once again left a popular and lucrative position amid eerily similar reports of on-set feuding, this time with fellow actress Alyssa Milano. Since then, Doherty has impersonated Brenda Walsh twice, starred in three reality shows, and appeared in the ill-fated TV version of "Heathers" that never aired.
She remained steadfast even after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, and then again when it returned years later. In 2019, she reprised the role of Walsh in the second reboot of her hit show BH90210, then presenting it as proof that even a woman battling stage four cancer can still work as an actor. One can imagine that it was also a way to let the "haters" know that Walsh was her heroine and she would claim it without shame or hesitation, despite the haters three decades earlier.
Doherty revisits the on-set controversy surrounding 90210 and Charmed in her Let's Be Clear podcast in 2023, which debuted when she was in the grip of incurable cancer that had spread to her bones and brain. Inviting Holly Marie Combs of Charmed and Tori Spelling of 90210 to try to clarify the situation and get the story out, the podcast offers moments of contrition and resignation, as well as opportunities for public reconciliation with numerous figures from her past. In many ways, the show felt like a preparation for the end she had to know was inevitable.
In the final episode of her podcast, released a week before her death, Doherty announced that she would be joining Combs on the House of Halliwell podcast to re-watch the Charmed series. Seemingly worried that she would be hated again, she told Combs: "I worry about people's reaction. Will they say, 'Wow, it was so much better without Shannen'? But that's because I always expect rejection or shame or something."
It's a reminder of the impact that experiences in the 1990s had on a lifetime, and the risk he faced by often revisiting his work in that era. It was a moment of vulnerability and authenticity that she sadly didn't get enough credit for throughout her career - her life was a hard-fought victory against the forces that made her a victim.
At 53, Shannen Doherty, an actress who starred in the popular series "Beverly Hills, 90210," "Charmed" and documented her nine-year battle with breast cancer, has died, her longtime publicist announced.
"It is with a heavy heart that I confirm the passing of actress Shannen Doherty. On Saturday, July 13, she lost her battle with cancer after many years of fighting the disease," Doherty's publicist Leslie Sloan said.
"The devoted daughter, sister, aunt and friend was surrounded by her loved ones as well as her dog Bowie. The family asks for privacy at this time so they can grieve in peace," she added. | BGNES
