Shannen Doherty summed up the experience of growing up as a woman in the 90s. As her iconic Beverly Hills, 90210 character, Brenda Walsh, she contained a volatile mix of Gen X angst, teenage fragility, and feminist courage. She thrived as a porcelain-skinned, dark-haired drama queen in a world of blonde, tanned valley girls, and owned her identity as an angry young woman before Courtney Love and Elizabeth Wurtzel made it a trend. She wasn’t for everyone, but that was part of her appeal.
The celebrity wasn’t always kind to Doherty, who died on July 13 at age 53, after a nine-year fight against breast cancer. Although she had been acting professionally for a decade when Fox 90210 debuted in 1990, the actor rose to full fame as the pioneering teen soap opera about social politics at West Beverly High slowly climbed the ratings. The tabloids sank their fangs into the young, photogenic cast, casting Doherty – who was still 19 when the show premiered – in the villainous role. Called out for her partying, her tumultuous romantic relationships and her allegedly imperious behavior on set, she was dropped from the long-running drama after four seasons.
“I was 21, trying to grow up and figure out who I was,” Doherty explained to TIME in 1998. “I didn’t consciously think, ‘Maybe I should be really low-key and stay in my house.’ Instead, I thought, ‘I’m 21 and I can go out and have fun and experience the whole college life.'” In retrospect, the typically self-conscious actress concluded that she had become an “easy target.” With the retrospect of A few additional decades later, it also seems clear that the media was unduly harsh on a young woman who came of age in the glare of paparazzi flashes.
Despite attempts by producer Aaron Spelling and creator Darren Star to replace Brenda with other brunette troublemakers, the show it was never the same without Doherty. 90210Brenda’s teenage characters began their lives as old-fashioned teen movie stereotypes: Brenda’s twin brother, Brandon, was the American golden boy; Kelly, the beautiful queen bee; Steve, her fraternal brother; Donna, the darling; David, the annoying little brother. Luke PerryThe motorcycle-riding bad boy was James Dean, with a trust fund. Doherty was the first to transform her character – conceived as a self-conscious transplant from the Midwest – into something more authentic and contemporary.
Infused with Doherty’s otherworldly fire, Brenda became a temperamental child, yes, but also a sincere romantic who channeled her overabundance of feelings into a love affair with the theater. His self-righteous smile, his withering gaze, and his wide, mischievous smile captured the emotional extremes of adolescence in a way that words could never express. In the early 1990s, after a decade of enormous right-wing backlash against the gains of second-wave feminism, America was waking up to the fury of a new generation of women. Not long after 90210 emerged, female-dominated punk bands like L7, Bikini Kill, and Hole broke into the rock mainstream—and Doherty’s performance began to feel not just inspired but also prescient.
These undertones of girl power didn’t stop Brenda from fighting Kelly (Jennie Garth, also considered Doherty’s biggest behind-the-scenes rival) over Dylan in one of the series’ most memorable storylines. When she lost her virginity to him at the end of Season 1, local affiliates criticized the producers for the consequence-free depiction of teen sex. Looking back at the characters’ relationships in a 2008 interview with New York Times, Doherty recalled “how confusing it could be at times, but ultimately there was love between them, and eventually they broke up.” To her, their romance was a funny and ultimately human story of a girl trying too hard to become the person she thinks her boyfriend wanted her to be. “It’s a good lesson,” she noted, “just be yourself and feel comfortable in your own skin.” Four decades in Hollywood seemed to have led the actress, who has been open about her mistakes, to a similar conclusion.
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 12, 1971, Doherty lived below the Mason-Dixon line long enough to absorb the Southern Baptist values promoted by her mother Rosa’s side of the family. When she was six, her parents moved Shannen and her older brother, Sean, to Los Angeles, where her father, Tom, bought a trucking company. Although their fortunes fluctuated throughout her childhood, she soon discovered her talent for acting in a religious production of Snow White. In 1982, the same year she voiced Teresa Brisby in the animated classic The NIMH Secretshe landed the role of Jenny Wilder in Little House on the Prairie. “This program changed my life,” said Doherty People on a 1992 cover story, recalling the advice her executive producer and star Michael Landon gave her: “Always stand up for yourself. Never let anyone walk all over you.
By the mid-’80s, Doherty had entered the decade’s burgeoning teen culture, racking up Young Artist Award nominations for roles in long-forgotten shows like Our home, besides starring in the silly film Girls just want to have fun alongside Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt. Viewers got their first glimpse of her mean girl swagger in 1989 Heathers, the cult black comedy that cast her as one of three identically named preppies who rule their school with manicured fists. A terribly funny funeral scene shows Doherty’s Heather Duke, dressed in a big hat and opera gloves, smiling beatifically as she thanks Jesus for her friend’s death.
For better or worse, it was 90210 which defined his public life after 1990, spawning anti-fanzines and punk singles that proclaimed his hatred of Brenda and giving Doherty a “difficult” reputation that she never overcame. But she had fun with her image in the independent films she did after leaving the series; Doherty is incandescent as a hurt girlfriend in Kevin Smith’s film Mallrats and hilarious in a brief role as a day-glo ditz in Gregg Araki’s film Nowhere.
Controversy followed her to the WB Charmed, a feel-good supernatural drama also produced by Spelling, where for three seasons beginning in 1998, she gave feisty performances as the eldest of three impossibly attractive witch sisters. Amid reports of clashes with co-star Alyssa Milano, Doherty’s character was killed off and Rose McGowan signed on to replace her.
Doherty was in and out of the spotlight after that, appearing on the 2004 Fox soap opera North Coast and, two years later, hosting an Oxygen reality show called Ending with Shannen Doherty, in which she helped aspiring singles get rid of their significant others others. Despite his abrupt departure from Beverly Hills, the franchise came calling again in 2008 with the CW reboot 90210. And she agreed to reprise the role of Brenda – now a famous stage actress – in a guest arc. “I didn’t want her to still be stuck in high school with the same attitude,” Doherty told the Times in 2008, explaining that she had vetted the producers’ new vision for Brenda to ensure the character evolved. “Although I don’t think Brenda was mean, she reacted to things that were happening around her, and she reacted like a teenager.”
After brief marriages to Ashley Hamilton (son of George Hamilton) in 1993 and Rick Salomon (the poker pro best known for co-starring in the Paris Hilton sex tape) in 2002, Doherty settled down with photographer Kurt Iswarienko in 2011; US reality TV show Shannen says narrated their preparations for the wedding. However, tragedy struck in 2015 when Doherty was diagnosed with breast cancer. After a brief remission, she revealed in Good Morning America In February 2020, her cancer was back and she had been living with a stage 4 diagnosis for a year. “I don’t think I’ve processed it yet. It’s a hard pill to swallow,” she said on tearful interview. “There are definitely days when I say, ‘Why me?’ And then I say, ‘Well, why not me? Who else?’” Still going strong that fall, Doherty reflected on his life with a vulnerability unprecedented in a widely read book. She profile. After an honest internal calculation, she explained: “What I discovered was that I have good karma. It may not seem like it, but I have been a very good human being.”
Doherty got one last opportunity to revisit Brenda Walsh – and prove she could laugh at herself – in 2019’s deeply self-aware film BH90210, a silly but fun meta-revival at Fox that had the original cast playing exaggerated versions of themselves. In caricatured real-life stories, Shannen was the free-spirited, post-fame resister, and the one whose salary was the envy of her co-stars. About Entertainment tonightDoherty explained that he decided to participate as a tribute to Luke Perry, who had he died after a stroke that March. “Repeating Brenda was something I said I wouldn’t do twice and I’ve done it twice, so I don’t think I could ever say I’ll never do something again because I end up doing it,” she said. “As [Perry’s] family on set, I felt like it was an important moment for all of us to come together to honor him.”
The fact that both actors died young seems tragic enough to come from the melodramatic mind of the character from whom Doherty’s identity proved so inextricable. It’s a small consolation that we remember them at their most romantic, as two rebellious teenagers with the world at their feet.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
