After battling breast cancer for a number of years, Shannen Doherty, a young actor who rose to fame in the 1990s while starring in the high school drama “Beverly Hills, 90210,” passed away on Saturday.
“Actress Shannen Doherty passed away, and I confirm this with heavy heart. After battling the illness for many years, she lost her fight with cancer on Saturday, July 13, according to Doherty’s publicist Leslie Sloane. 53 was her age.
Doherty went into remission two years after receiving her initial breast cancer diagnosis in 2015. That relief was only temporary. According to court records in a case Doherty filed in February 2020 against her insurance provider for home damage, she was “dying” from Stage 4 breast cancer, which had spread to the point of incurability.
“In many ways, it’s a bitter pill to swallow,” Doherty said at the time on “Good Morning America.” “I do have days when I ask myself, ‘Why me?'” I then ask myself, “Well, why not me?” I mean, who else deserves this but me? Not one of us does.
She revealed on Instagram in June 2023 that she had brain metastases from her disease at the start of the year.
In the caption of a video of herself getting radiotherapy, Doherty said, “My brain scan on January 5th revealed that I had Mets.”
“It’s clear that I’m afraid. Doherty remarked, “I had a lot going on in my life and I am really claustrophobic. “But this is how cancer can look—the fear, the turmoil, the timing of it all.”
Doherty’s journey to Hollywood began quickly after her birth on April 12, 1971, in Memphis, Tennessee, where her father worked as a bank employee and her mother managed a beauty salon. Three years after her family relocated to Los Angeles, she made her acting debut at the age of ten on the brief television series “Father Murphy.”
After spotting the budding actress, series producer Michael Landon decided to cast her as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s adopted daughter for an 18-episode run on his popular show “Little House on the Prairie” the following year.
This exposure resulted in a string of parts, such as a three-year stint (1986–1988) as a lead in the Wilford Brimley family drama “Our House” and a main role in the 1989 high school dark comedy “Heathers.”
The arrival of “Beverly Hills, 90210,” the role she would be associated with for the rest of her life, would provide her with her greatest break the following year. Playing the prim-and-proper yet impetuous Brenda Walsh in the early 1990s, Doherty, then 19 years old, sprang to fame as the program became a generation’s guilty pleasure.
But for Doherty, things weren’t always going as planned. The actor gained a reputation for being challenging to deal with on the set and was said to have feuded with several members of the staff and cast, most notably Jennie Garth, who was his co-star. She became as notorious as she was renowned because of the headlines in celebrity glossies and the tense broadcasts on entertainment news programs.
“She turned into a parable reality-TV celebrity before there were real reality-TV celebrities,” stated Robert Thompson, the director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. “It appeared as though two shows were airing simultaneously featuring the genuine Shannen Doherty—you can put six sets of quotation marks around the term “real.”
The majority of the other leads on the program, including Garth, continued for a further six seasons when Doherty left following the fourth season.
“Leaving ‘90210’ at the right time was the best thing that could have happened to me,” Doherty stated to Entertainment Weekly in 2008. It helped me develop my personal identity and achieve a small amount of serenity. Not the person the media painted me as because I had gone through some difficult times in my personal life, was having trouble identifying a poor partner or husband and was doing it in public, so I wasn’t handling any of it well. Actually, I wasn’t. And I am aware of that.
Jason Priestley, Doherty’s co-star, expressed his sadness on social media upon learning of her passing, writing that she was “a natural force, and I shall miss her.”
Her career didn’t show the potential it had a few years earlier, although she would go on to have a few more movie appearances in the middle of the decade, including in filmmaker Kevin Smith’s R-rated comedy “Mallrats.” That is, up until she made amends and got back together with producer Aaron Spelling of “90210” in order to get a leading part in the well-liked supernatural serial series “Charmed,” costarring Alyssa Milano and Holly Marie Combs. For the three seasons, she was on the show before leaving again before its run ended, becoming a witch seemed to bring back the magic she had before. Three of the last episodes she starred in were directed by her.
Milano, Doherty’s co-star in “Charmed,” released a statement after learning of her passing.
“Shannen and I had a difficult relationship, but at its core, she was someone I greatly respected and found amazing,” Milano remarked. The world is a less place without her, as she was a gifted actress who was adored by many. I’m sorry to everyone who knew and loved her.
She alternated between brief television shows during the start of the twenty-first century, and by 2006, she had made the transition to true reality television as host of “Breaking Up With Shannen Doherty,” where she assisted viewers in ending unhealthy relationships.
Given her past two divorces, it appeared that Doherty was well-versed in the topic. Her 1993 marriage to Ashley Hamilton, the actor George Hamilton’s son, ended in divorce in 1994, and her 2002 annulment from Rick Salomon occurred nine months after the couple’s wedding. Doherty filed for divorce from photographer Kurt Iswarienko, her third spouse, in April 2023. The couple wed in 2011.
However, acquaintances report that Doherty became less eccentric as he got older. She would return to her iconic role as Brenda Walsh twice: once for a lengthy cameo on the 2008 revival of “90210,” and again in the 2019 dramedy “BH90210,” in which the original cast members came back to portray made-up versions of themselves in a bid to bring back the popular show.
According to Thompson, the reason she continued returning to the character voluntarily was not just because she could never shake the part’s allure.
She is the second prominent “Beverly Hills, 90210” cast member to pass away young; Luke Perry passed away in March 2019 following complications from a stroke.