Shannen Doherty, who has died from cancer aged 53, was a film and television actress who struggled to outgrow the tempestuous reputation she gained in her early twenties while working on the hit teen drama Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990-2000).
Produced by TV mogul Aaron Spelling but the brainchild of Darren Star, who would later create HBO’s Sex & The City (1998-2004), 90210 was a glossy fantasy describing the progress of the Walsh twins – Jason Priestley’s boy-next-door Brandon and Doherty’s flintier Brenda – as their family relocated from flatland Minnesota to sunkissed California.
Initially scheduled against the hallowed Cheers (1982-1993), the series advanced in the US ratings after pivoting away from its early, issue-led plotlines towards photogenic afterschool soap; it also became a minor sensation after launching in ITV’s Saturday teatime slot.
Yet the distance between carefully curated onscreen aspiration and troubled show reality could be measured by a sliding scale of supermarket-tabloid headlines. In December 1991, Teen magazine declared Doherty “90210’s Coolest Co-Ed”; by March 1993, US magazine was running with “Shannen Doherty: ‘I Don’t Know How Much Worse It Can Get’”.
Suffice to say Doherty had taken to stardom altogether chaotically; indeed, at one point, her bank intervened after the actress reportedly wrote $32,000 of bad cheques. More damaging were the bad vibes emanating from on set: there was open enmity with resident “good girl” Jennie Garth, who later admitted the pair “wanted to claw one another’s eyes out”. After continually reporting late for work, and eventually confounding continuity by cutting her hair mid-shoot, Doherty finally left 90210 in 1994, her image digitally purged from a subsequent flashback episode.
Interviewed in 2000, Doherty reflected on the circumstances that led to her departure: “It wasn’t like I walked out one day and said, ‘I quit’. It was a very long process. Aaron got as fed up with me as I was with the show, and I think it was because the notoriety was too much. People were hating the character, and I couldn't take the abuse that came with that… It was all very hurtful.”
For a while, Doherty threatened to become no more than a pop-cultural punchline. In August 1996, she was sentenced to anger management counselling after throwing a beer bottle at the windscreen of a motorist with whom she’d rowed; she was parodied as demanding diva “Hunter Fallow” on the WB series Grosse Pointe (2000-01) – the show that happened to be Darren Star’s network follow-up to 90210.
By then, Doherty had found herself a second home amid a coven of suburban witches on a rival WB show. The Spelling-produced Charmed (1998-2006) was one of the cosier fantasy series to be greenlit following the success of The X-Files (1993-2002) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), blending photogenic leads, supernatural misadventures and a light dash of sisterhood.
Yet the show’s positioning as Gothy comfort viewing was undermined by reports of more unrest, this time between Doherty and co-star Alyssa Milano. Possibly sensing history had started to repeat itself, Spelling sided with Milano, and replaced Doherty with Rose McGowan before season four; yet Doherty was savvy enough to retain her percentage as the show rolled on into syndication, and later reconciled with Milano amid a 2013 Twitter thread floating the idea of a Charmed reunion movie.
While promoting her 2010 self-help book Badass: A Hard-Earned Guide to Living Life with Style and (the Right) Attitude, Doherty reflected on her often acrimonious career: “I have a rep. Did I earn it? Yeah, I did. But after a while you sort of try to shed that rep because you’re kind of a different person. You’ve evolved and all the bad things you’ve done in your life have brought you to a much better place.”
Shannen Maria Doherty was born in Memphis, Tennessee on April 12, 1971, the younger of two children for banker Tom Doherty and his beautician wife Rosa (née Wright), who raised the family in the Southern Baptist faith. The clan moved to Los Angeles seven years later, when Doherty’s father was appointed to head the West Coast arm of the family transportation business.
Hitting the auditions circuit hard alongside her mother, Doherty landed two episodes of the Western series Father Murphy in 1981, impressing actor-turned-showrunner Michael Landon so much he found Doherty roles on the final season of the much-loved Little House on the Prairie (1974-83) and Highway to Heaven (1985); juggling acting with studies, she also appeared in such primetime mainstays as Magnum, PI (1983) and Airwolf (1984), and played Robert Kennedy’s daughter Kathleen in the miniseries Robert Kennedy and His Times (1985).
Doherty was lucky to hit adolescence amid the mid-Eighties boom in teen-themed entertainment, driven by such blockbuster successes as Back to the Future (1985) – and she had the advantage of not having to play markedly younger than she was, unlike Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt, her twentysomething co-stars in Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985).
She landed her most prominent big-screen role as one of the titular mean girls in the cult black comedy Heathers (1988), although it was unclear whether she entirely knew what she was getting into at the time. According to co-star (and senior Heather) Lisanne Falk, the 17-year-old Doherty emerged from a test screening giggling “I didn’t realise we were making a comedy”.
In the wake of her TV breakthrough – and subsequent notoriety – Doherty made a haphazard bid for maturity, stripping for Playboy in 1993 and the thriller Blindfold: Acts of Obsession (1994), where she met, fell for and briefly found herself engaged to co-star Judd Nelson. Her tenacity impressed William Friedkin, who cast Doherty as a wild child in Jailbreakers (1994); revisiting her roots, she also played Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell in the tepid telefilm A Burning Passion (1994).
Full movie stardom, however, proved far harder to attain. She landed a rare lead in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats (1995) – ominously beating Alyssa Milano to the role – and recurred as a valley girl in Gregg Araki’s Nowhere (1997), alongside her Charmed replacement McGowan; but she turned down roles in Smith’s subsequent Dogma (1999) and postmodern sequel Scream 3 (2000), instead seeing her CV fill up with direct-to-DVD titles.
TV welcomed her back, first tentatively, then with greater trust. Amid the perhaps inevitable Beverly Hills, 90210: 10-Year High School Reunion (2003), Doherty confessed she found it hard pretending pin-up Priestley was her brother, on account of his “being so hot”. She hosted two seasons of prank show Scare Tactics (2003-2004), and was first off the tenth season of Dancing with the Stars (2005).
Yet a third dramatic success was beyond her. Upmarket soap North Shore (2004), on which her character was introduced stepping out of a limo with the line “It beats the hell out of Beverly Hills”, was cancelled after one season; she was replaced on the sitcom Love, Inc. (2005) after shooting the pilot. By 2006, she was being harassed by Leigh Francis’s alter ego Avid Merrion on the Channel 4 comedy Bo! in the USA.
She remained a tabloid focal point, not least for her turbulent love life. Marriage to George Hamilton’s son Ashley at the height of her 90210 fame, when she was 22 and he was 18, lasted only five months; there were subsequent engagements to cosmetics heir Dean Factor (who filed a restraining order against his fiancée in May 1993) and real-estate developer Chris Foufas. A second marriage, to professional poker player Rick Salomon, was annulled after nine months.
Doherty was at least game enough to make a joke out of this merry-go-round, signing up to host the hidden camera dating show Breaking Up with Shannen Doherty (2006). And she eventually found love with photographer Kurt Iswarienko: married in 2011, they remained together until a divorce prompted by his infidelity in 2023. “Listen, Elizabeth Taylor still has me beat as far as husbands and divorces, so I’m good,” she rationalised. “There’s no reason to be negative about it. S**t happens.”
By then, though, she’d become a fixture in the press for health reasons. Doherty announced a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2015; it went into remission after a mastectomy in 2016 before returning in 2019. In 2020, she revealed the cancer was now stage IV; by 2023, it had spread to her brain and bones.
Tenacious to the last, she worked throughout her treatment, appearing in both the TV reboot of Heathers (2018) and BH90210 (2019), a knowing comic riff on her breakthrough show in which she and her sometime co-stars reunited playing themselves, renegotiating fallouts that had long been a matter of public record; despite good reviews, it was cancelled after one season.
In 2023, she launched her own podcast, Let’s Be Clear with Shannen Doherty, which mixed personal recollections with campaigning for cancer research and activism on behalf of her fellow patients: “People just assume [cancer] means you can’t walk, you can’t eat, you can’t work. They put you out to pasture at a very early age – ‘you’re done, you’re retired.’ We’re vibrant, and we have such a different outlook on life. We are people who want to work and embrace life and keep moving forward.”
Shannen Doherty, born April 12, 1971, died July 13, 2024.
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