Shannen Doherty, a child actor who became one of the biggest stars of the 1990s on the high school show “Beverly Hills, 90210,” died on Saturday. She had been sick with breast cancer for a long time.
“With heavy hearts, I have to say that actress Shannen Doherty has died.” “Yesterday, July 13, after a long battle with cancer, she lost her battle,” said Leslie Sloane, Doherty’s spokeswoman.
She was 53 years old.
Doherty was first told she had breast cancer in 2015, but after two years, the cancer stopped growing. That break wouldn’t last. Doherty sued her insurance company over damage to her home in February 2020, and court papers said she was “dying” of Stage 4 breast cancer that had spread to the point where it could not be cured.
He said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” at the time, “It’s a bitter pill to swallow in a lot of ways.” “There are days when I do ask myself, ‘Why me?'” Then I ask myself, “Why not me?” Someone else doesn’t deserve this but me. We don’t do it.
“Mets were found in my brain on January 5th,” Doherty wrote under a video of herself getting radiation.
“My fear is clear.” “A lot was going on in my life, and I’m very afraid of being squished,” Doherty said. “But that fear…that turmoil…that timing…that’s what cancer can look like.”
Doherty was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 12, 1971. Her mother ran a beauty shop, and her father worked in a bank. It didn’t take her long to get to Hollywood. It happened when she was 10 years old, on the short-lived show “Father Murphy,” her first starring job. This was only three years after her family moved to Los Angeles.
Shannen Doherty has died after a long battle with breast cancer: https://t.co/2wXgaqZ30A pic.twitter.com/9Pwc6JkB1w
— People (@people) July 14, 2024
Producer Michael Landon saw the young actress and put her in 18 episodes of his hit show “Little House on the Prairie” the next year as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s adopted daughter.
After that, he got a lot of parts, including a three-year lead role on the Wilford Brimley family drama “Our House” (1986–1988) and the lead role in the dark comedy “Heathers” (1989) about a high school.
But the next year, when “Beverly Hills, 90210” came out, it was her big break. She would be linked to that part for the rest of her life. In the early 1990s, Doherty, who was 19 at the time, became a star when she played the strict but short-tempered Brenda Walsh on the show that became a secret pleasure for a generation.
Not always, though, did things go as planned for Doherty. The actor got a bad name for being hard to work with on set, allegedly getting into fights with cast and crew, especially with co-star Jennie Garth. As well as being popular, she was also infamous because of the stories in celebrity magazines and on entertainment news shows.
Robert Thompson, who runs the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, said, “She became a reality TV star before there were real reality TV stars.” “It was like the real Shannen Doherty—and you can put six sets of quotation marks around the word “real”—had two shows going at the same time.”
Doherty quit the show after the fourth season, but most of the other stars, like Garth, stayed for another six seasons.
Doherty told Entertainment Weekly in 2008, “I getting off ‘90210’ when I did was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.” “It gave me some peace and helped me figure out who I was.
” Not the person the press made me out to be because I’d had some bad things happen in my personal life. I was trying to figure out who was a bad husband or boyfriend while I was in the spotlight, so I wasn’t handling any of it well. I wasn’t really. I am aware of that.
Jason Priestley, who worked with Doherty, said on social media that he was sad to hear about her death and that she was “a force of nature and I will miss her.”
In the middle of the decade, she had a few more movie parts, including one in “Mallrats,” an R-rated comedy directed by Kevin Smith. But her career wasn’t going as well as it had a few years before. That is, until she made up with Aaron Spelling, the producer of “90210,” and got a lead part in the popular supernatural soap opera “Charmed” with Alyssa Milano and Holly Marie Combs.
She seemed to enjoy magic again when she played a witch, at least for the three seasons she was on the show before she quit again before the end of its run. Three of the last episodes in which she appears were directed by her.
After hearing about Doherty’s death, her “Charmed” co-star Milano commented.
“It’s no secret that my relationship with Shannen was complicated, but at its core, she was someone I admired and respected,” Milano said. “Many people loved her as an actress, and the world is less interesting without her.” I’m sorry for all of her loved ones’ loss.
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At the start of the 21st century, she went from one short-lived TV show to the next. By 2006, she was hosting the reality show “Breaking Up With Shannen Doherty,” where she helped people stop bad relationships.
Doherty seemed to know a lot about that because she had just been through two divorces. Her first marriage, to Ashley Hamilton, son of star George Hamilton, ended in divorce in 1994. Her second marriage, to Rick Salomon, ended in an annulment nine months after the wedding in 2002. She asked for a divorce from her third husband, photographer Kurt Iswarienko, whom she married in 2011, in April 2023.
But Doherty seemed to calm down as he got older, according to his friends. She would play Brenda Walsh again twice: in the 2008 reboot of “90210” as a guest star for a long time, and in the 2019 drama “BH90210,” in which the original cast came back to play fake versions of themselves as they tried to get back to their hit show.
“Not only was she never able to get away from that role, but she kept going back to it on her own,” Thompson said.
Luke Perry died in March 2019 after problems from a stroke. She is the second major cast member from “Beverly Hills, 90210” to die young.
