Shannen Doherty, a child actor who became one of the biggest stars of the 1990s as a student on the high school drama “Beverly Hills, 90210,” died Saturday after facing breast cancer for several years.
“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,” said Doherty’s publicist Leslie Sloane.
She was 53.
Doherty was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, but she went into remission two years later. That reprieve wouldn’t last. In February 2020, court documents in a lawsuit Doherty filed against her insurance company over damage to her home said she was “dying” of Stage 4 breast cancer, which metastasized to the point of being incurable.
“It’s a bitter pill to swallow in a lot of ways,” Doherty told “Good Morning America” at the time. “There are definitely days where I say, ‘Why me?’ And then I go, ‘Well, why not me? Who else besides me deserves this?’ None of us do.”
In June 2023, she shared an emotional post on Instagram revealing that her cancer had spread to her brain at the beginning of the year.
“On January 5th, my scan showed Mets in my brain,” Doherty captioned a video of her receiving radiation.
“My fear is obvious. I am extremely claustrophobic and there was a lot going on in my life,” said Doherty. “But that fear…. The turmoil….. the timing of it all…. This is what cancer can look like.”
Born on April 12, 1971, in Memphis, Tennessee, to a mother who owned a beauty salon and a father who worked in a bank, it didn’t take long for Doherty to go Hollywood. It happened by the time she was 10, when she made her acting debut on the short-lived series “Father Murphy” just three years after her family moved to Los Angeles.
Series producer Michael Landon noticed the fledgling actor and cast her on his hit show “Little House on the Prairie” the following year as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s adopted daughter for an 18-episode run.
That exposure led to a succession of roles, including a three-year turn (1986-88) on the Wilford Brimley family drama “Our House” as one of the leads and a starring turn in the 1989 high school dark comedy “Heathers.”
Her biggest break, however, would come the following year with the arrival of “Beverly Hills, 90210,” the role she would be linked to for the rest of her life. Doherty, then 19, became a superstar in the early ’90s playing the straight-laced but short-tempered Brenda Walsh as the show became a guilty pleasure for a generation.
Things, however, didn’t always go according to script for Doherty. The actor developed a reputation for being difficult to work with on the set — purportedly feuding with cast and crew members, especially with co-star Jennie Garth. The headlines in celebrity glossies and breathless reports on the entertainment news shows made her as infamous as she was famous.
“She became a metaphorical reality-TV star before there were actual reality-TV stars,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “It was as if the real Shannen Doherty, and you can put six sets of quotation marks around the word ‘real,’ had two shows playing in parallel.”
Doherty left the show after its fourth season; most of the show’s other leads, including Garth, lasted another six seasons.
“The best thing that ever could have happened to me was I got off ‘90210’ when I did,” Doherty told Entertainment Weekly in 2008. “It let me find a little bit of peace and discover who I was as a person. Not the person who the press made me out to be because I’d had a few bad experiences in my personal life, and I was struggling to figure out a bad husband or a bad boyfriend and I was doing it under the spotlight, so I wasn’t reacting well to any of it. I really wasn’t. And I know that.”
Doherty’s co-star Jason Priestley took to social media to express sadness at news of her death saying she was “a force of nature and I will miss her.”
There would be a few more movie roles in the middle of the decade, including in director Kevin Smith’s R-rated comedy “Mallrats,” but her career didn’t show the promise it did just a few years earlier. That is, until she reconciled and reunited with “90210” producer Aaron Spelling to land a starring role in the popular supernatural soap opera “Charmed,” alongside Alyssa Milano and Holly Marie Combs. Playing a witch seemed to rekindle the magic she enjoyed earlier — at least for the three seasons she stayed on before once again leaving prior the show’s run ending. She directed three of the final episodes in which she appeared.
Doherty’s “Charmed” co-star Milano issued a statement following news of her death.
“It’s no secret that Shannen and I had a complicated relationship, but at its core was someone I deeply respected and was in awe of,” Milano said. “She was a talented actress, beloved by many and the world is less without her. My condolences to all who loved her.”
At the beginning of the 21st century, she jumped from one short-lived television series to another, and by 2006, she had moved into real reality television, hosting the series “Breaking Up With Shannen Doherty,” in which she helped participants end their toxic relationships.
That seemed to be a subject Doherty knew well, coming off two divorces: Her marriage to Ashley Hamilton, son of actor George Hamilton, in 1993 ended in divorce in 1994; the other to Rick Salomon ended in a 2002 annulment nine months after the wedding. In April 2023, Doherty filed for divorce from her third husband, photographer Kurt Iswarienko, whom she married in 2011.
By friends’ accounts, though, Doherty mellowed in middle age. She would reprise her signature role of Brenda Walsh twice: for an extended guest-starring turn on the 2008 reboot “90210” and in a 2019 dramedy, “BH90210,” in which the original cast returned to play fictional versions of themselves as they attempted to revisit their hit show.
“It was not only that was she never able to escape the gravitational pull of that role, but that she kept going back to it of her own free will,” Thompson said.
She is the second major cast member from “Beverly Hills, 90210” to die young: Luke Perry died in March 2019 due to complications from a stroke.
