Shannen Doherty, who has died aged 53, was a child star who played one of the titular mean girls in the cult black film comedy Heathers (1988); but thereafter she struggled to outgrow the tempestuous wild-child reputation she gained in her early twenties while working on the hit 1990s teen drama Beverly Hills, 90210.
The glossy soap, which ran from 1990 to 2000, became a minor sensation in the UK after ITV moved it into the Saturday teatime slot. It described the progress of the Walsh twins – Jason Priestley’s boy-next-door Brandon and Doherty’s flintier Brenda – after their family relocate from flatland Minnesota to sunkissed California, where they struggle to preserve their wholesome Midwestern values in a Gomorrah of rich, latchkey kids and mansion parties.
Produced by the television mogul Aaron Spelling, but the brainchild of Darren Star who would later create HBO’s Sex & The City (1998-2004), it was initially scheduled in the US against the hallowed Cheers (1982-93), but saw its audience dramatically increase after dropping its early, issue-led plotlines (Aids, breast cancer, sex education, drugs and date rape in the first series alone) and settled into being a photogenic after-school soap.
The Daily Telegraph cited the show’s immense popularity amongst teenagers as evidence that “young people are getting ‘older’ – conformist, inflexible, dull... The central characters are the revolting Walsh twins, Brenda and Brandon, who [...] are happiest sharing cookies and milk with their dreary father (an accountant, a profession about which they appear not to be embarrassed) and mother (a happy housewife, for whom they have no feminist ambitions) [...] Do they hate their parents, go on anti-war demonstrations, dream of being beat poets, when they grow up? Sadly, no.”
Nevertheless, by 1992 the show was a juggernaut. Shannen Doherty recalled being told by a receptionist: “What you have done for brunettes is amazing. It’s always the blondes that get the guy, who have the wonderful life... And you have totally turned it around.” She could not visit malls without being accosted, and she spawned her own Shannen Doherty Barbie doll.
But the growing gap between Beverly Hills, 90210’s carefully curated, aspirational scenes of teenagers with credit cards who drive immaculate cars and the troubled reality offscreen could be measured by the sliding scale of supermarket-tabloid headlines. In December 1991, Teen magazine had 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’ ”.
The actress’s bank intervened after she reportedly wrote $32,000 of bad cheques. A nightclub altercation with a fellow actress settled out of court. On set, there was open enmity with the resident “good girl” Jennie Garth, who later admitted that the pair “wanted to claw one another’s eyes out”. The writers increasingly infused Doherty’s offscreen haughtiness into the character of Brenda, making her the “bitch” of the series.
After continually reporting late for work, and defiantly cutting her hair mid-shoot, Shannen Doherty finally left 90210 in 1994, her image digitally purged from a subsequent flashback episode. By this point, she had spawned the fan newsletter “I Hate Brenda”, which had a hotline called the “Shannen Snitch Line” for anonymous reports of any bad girl antics.
“I think it was because the notoriety was too much,” she recalled. “People were hating the character, and I couldn’t take the abuse that came with that… It was all very hurtful.”
For a while, Shannen Doherty risked becoming a pop-cultural one-liner. In 1996 she was sentenced to anger-management counselling after throwing a beer bottle at the windscreen of a motorist with whom she had rowed. She was parodied as the demanding diva “Hunter Fallow” on the series Grosse Pointe (2000-1), Darren Star’s follow-up to 90210.
But by then Shannen Doherty had found herself a second home amid a coven of suburban witches on a rival 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 her co-star Alyssa Milano, and Spelling replaced Shannen Doherty with Rose McGowan before season four. Shannen Doherty was savvy enough, however, to retain her percentage as the show rolled on into syndication.
In 2010, Doherty published a self-help book Badass: A Hard-Earned Guide to Living Life with Style and (the Right) Attitude. She was adamant that she had no apology to make: “Does everybody get along at work 100 percent of the time?”
Shannen Maria Doherty was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 12 1971, the younger of two children of Tom Doherty, a banker, and his beautician wife Rosa, née Wright, who brought up 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 transport company.
Hitting the auditions circuit hard alongside her mother, Shannen landed two episodes of the Western series Father Murphy in 1981, impressing the actor-turned-showrunner Michael Landon so much that he found her roles on the final season of the much-loved Little House on the Prairie (1974-83), as well as 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).
Her adolescence timed perfectly with the mid-Eighties boom in teen-themed entertainment, driven by such blockbuster big-screen successes as Back to the Future (1985). 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 the 1985 film Girls Just Want to Have Fun.
She landed her most prominent film role as Heather Duke in Heathers, tartly responding, when Winona Ryder’s puzzled character asks her: “Why do you have to be such a mega-bitch?” “Because I can be.” According to her co-star (and senior Heather) Lisanne Falk, the 17-year-old Shannen Doherty emerged from a test screening giggling: “I didn’t realise we were making a comedy.”
In the wake of her television 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 her co-star Judd Nelson. Her toughness impressed the veteran director William Friedkin, who cast her as a wild child in Jailbreakers (1994). Revisiting her Southern roots, she also played Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell in the tepid telefilm A Burning Passion (1994).
But full movie stardom proved far harder to attain. She landed a rare lead in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats (1995) and appeared in Gregg Araki’s Nowhere (1997) alongside her Charmed replacement Rose McGowan; but she turned down roles in Smith’s subsequent Dogma (1999) and postmodern sequel Scream3 (2000), instead filling her CV with direct-to-DVD titles.
Television welcomed her back, tentatively at first, with the inevitable Beverly Hills, 90210: 10-Year High School Reunion (2003). She hosted two seasons of prank show Scare Tactics (2003-2004 – which the Guardian called “the most mean-spirited hidden-camera show on TV” – and briefly graced Dancing with the Stars (2005).
But dramatic success eluded her. The 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.
She remained a tabloid focal point, not least for her turbulent love life. Marriage to the actor 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 the cosmetics heir Dean Factor (who filed a restraining order against his fiancée in May 1993) and the real-estate developer Chris Foufas.
A second marriage, to the professional poker player Rick Salomon, who would later achieve notoriety for a sex tape with Paris Hilton, was annulled after nine months.
Doherty was 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). In 2011, she married photographer Kurt Iswarienko, but divorced in 2023. “Listen, Elizabeth Taylor still has me beat as far as husbands and divorces, so I’m good,” she said.
In 2015 she announced a diagnosis of breast cancer, which by 2023 had spread to her brain and bones. 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 to play themselves, renegotiating fallouts that had long been a matter of public record; but despite good reviews, it was cancelled after one season.
In 2023, she launched a podcast, Let’s Be Clear with Shannen Doherty, which mixed personal recollections with campaigning on behalf of cancer 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
