Shannen Doherty, the Beverly Hills, 90210 star whose life and career were roiled by illness and tabloid stories, has died at 53.
After years with breast cancer, Doherty died Saturday, according to a statement from her publicist, Leslie Sloane.
“The devoted daughter, sister, aunt and friend was surrounded by her loved ones as well as her dog, Bowie. The family asks for their privacy at this time so they can grieve in peace,” Sloane said Sunday. The news was first reported by People magazine.
Her illness was publicly revealed in a lawsuit filed in 2015 against her former business managers, in which she alleged they mismanaged her money and allowed her health insurance to lapse. She later shared intimate details of her treatment following a single mastectomy. In December 2016, she posted a photo of her first day of radiation, calling the treatment “frightening” for her.
In February 2020, Doherty revealed that the cancer had returned and she was at stage four. She said she came forward because her health conditions could come out in court. The actor had sued insurance giant State Farm after her California home was damaged in a fire in 2018.
“I have no idea how long I’m going to be on the chemo for. … That’s not something that I can predict, it’s not something my doctors can predict. And it’s scary, it’s like a big wake-up call,” Doherty said on a late June episode of her podcast Let’s Be Clear, adding that a recent change in the shape of her cancer cells meant there were new treatment protocols for her to try. “For the first time in a couple months probably, I feel hopeful because there are so many more protocols now, whereas before I was hopeful — but I was still getting prepared.”
A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Doherty moved to Los Angeles with her family at age 7 and, within a few years, became an actor.
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“It was completely my decision,” she told The Associated Press in a 1994 interview. “My parents never pushed me into anything. They support me. It really wouldn’t matter if I was a professional soccer player — they’d still be as supportive and loving.”
As a child star, she worked steadily in such TV series as Little House on the Prairie, in which she played Jenny Wilder. She detoured as a teenager to the big screen in Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985) and Heathers.
In 1990, the doe-eyed, dark-haired actor won her breakout role as Brenda Walsh in producer Aaron Spelling’s hit teenage melodrama set in posh Beverly Hills. She and Canadian actor Jason Priestley’s Brandon, Brenda’s twin brother, were fish-out-of-water Midwesterners.
But Doherty’s fame came with media scrutiny and accounts of outbursts, drinking and impulsiveness — the latter most notably after a very brief marriage to actor George Hamilton’s son, Ashley. Doherty’s second marriage, in 2002, was to Rick Salomon and was annulled within a year. In 2011, Doherty married photographer Kurt Iswarienko. She filed for divorce in April 2023.
She left Beverly Hills, 90210 at the end of its fourth season in 1994 (the show aired until 2000), reportedly removed by Spelling because of conflicts with her co-stars and chronic lateness.
But in her 1994 AP interview, Doherty described her life as peaceful.
“It must be, if you pick up the Enquirer and find the only thing they can write about me is that I installed a pay phone next to my house and was seen at Stroud’s (a discount bed-and-bath chain) buying $1,400 worth of bed linens and wouldn’t go to an expensive store,” she said. “It must be calm if they’re pulling that stuff out of their heads.”
Three years later, in 1997, Doherty was sentenced to anger-management counselling by a Beverly Hills Municipal Court judge after she allegedly smashed a beer bottle onto a man’s windshield during a quarrel. After a 2001 drunken driving arrest, she pleaded no contest and was ordered to serve five days in a work-release program.
Doherty reunited with Spelling when he cast her in 1998 as Prue Halliwell in Charmed. In an AP interview that year, the actor expressed regrets about her past.
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“I did bring a lot of it on myself,” Doherty said. “I don’t think I can point fingers and say, ‘Oh, YOU’RE to blame.’ And I don’t do that with myself, either. Because I was just growing up.”
Her personality was “grotesquely misconstrued” by the media, Doherty added.
Spelling said at the time that their relationship was never as bad as some made it seem.
“We had a few bumps along the road, but golly, who doesn’t?” said Spelling, who died in 2006. “Everything Shannen did was blown out of proportion by the rag sheets.”
Doherty starred with Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano in Charmed from 1998-2001, at which point her character was replaced by one played by Rose McGowan. Doherty appeared in the 90210 sequel series seven years later and competed on Dancing With the Stars in 2010. She also worked on the third Beverly Hills, 90210 reboot, BH90210, a meta send-up that reunited most of the original cast and aired for one season in 2019.
She also appeared in a tribute episode of Riverdale dedicated to that show’s star — and her late Beverly Hills, 90210 on-screen love interest — Luke Perry.
Doherty struggled to recapture her Beverly Hills, 90210 star status, but worked in big-screen films including Mallrats and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and in such TV movies as A Burning Passion: The Margaret Mitchell Story, in which she played the Gone with the Wind author. A nadir was Blindfold: Acts of Obsession, an erotic thriller opposite Judd Nelson.
Doherty’s lawsuit against her ex-business managers was settled in 2016. She was open about the toll that cancer was taking. She posted photos that showed the baldness that followed treatment and, in an August 2016 interview with Entertainment Tonight, shared her fears.
“The unknown is always the scariest part,” she said. “Is the chemo going to work? Is the radiation going to work?” she said. “Pain is manageable, you know living without a breast is manageable, it’s the worry of your future and how your future is going to affect the people that you love.”
Doherty advocated for cancer awareness and care, and spoke to the AP in 2021 about how spending years with the disease affected her life and sense of optimism.
“When you get something like cancer, your tolerance for drama is zero. I don’t like people wasting my time. I don’t like negativity,” she said. “It’s odd because I think if you look back, you’re like, ‘Oh, gosh, it’s so much drama around her,’ but I don’t think I was necessarily into the drama. I just think if we took young 18-year-old Shannen, 19-year-old Shannen, and we took her and planted her like right now, I would be a nerd and nobody would be writing about me.”
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Lynn Elber, a longtime television writer, retired from The Associated Press in 2022. AP journalists Alicia Rancilio and Mallika Sen contributed reporting.
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