The slick television series Beverly Hills 90210, which focused on the lives and loves of young, privileged Los Angelenos, was first aired in 1990 to fairly low ratings and general indifference. As it began tackling serious issues relevant to its young audience, it grew into a phenomenon that ran throughout the decade and came to define it culturally; the New York Times credited it with single-handedly inventing the teen soap opera.
The show reached US audiences of more than 21 million and made worldwide stars of its main cast members, Luke Perry, Jason Priestley and Shannen Doherty.
Doherty, who has died aged 53 of cancer, played the wholesome Brenda Walsh, whose family, including her twin brother Brandon (Priestley), arrives in California from Minnesota in the first episode.
Shortly after enrolling at West Beverly Hills High, Brenda starts breaking rules, procuring a fake ID to enter a nightclub and dating a supposed bad boy, Dylan (Perry), against her father’s wishes. The first season ends with her losing her virginity, while the second begins with her believing herself to be pregnant. Her mother is aghast at the transformation: “You didn’t wear this much makeup in Minnesota,” she says.
Doherty believed the show was performing an important function. “We represent situations to our audience, and I don’t think we take a side,” she told Rolling Stone magazine in 1992. “It’s something that brings families together.”
The great responsibility she felt towards her audience also influenced the material. “In one episode, they had my character wanting to lose weight, like eight pounds or something. I’m fairly thin, and with bulimia and anorexia such big problems, I was concerned that these girls who look up to me might take it the wrong way.” The producers agreed to remove the offending scenes from the show.
She stuck around for a total of four seasons, departing under a cloud in 1994. “Shannen’s behaviour in the fourth year really indicated that she was very unhappy being here,” said the series showrunner, Charles Rosin, in 2008. “She was habitually late. And finally one day she showed up late, and the cast … got very angry, and they called [the producer Aaron] Spelling, and he did not renew her contract. He gave her the face-saving moment to say that she didn’t want to come back.”
For her part, Doherty felt she had been misrepresented. “If you consider ‘difficult’ being a strong woman who sticks up for herself, yeah, I admit to it. I’m open to different ideas, but if you get on my bad side and don’t listen to me and you don’t treat me with as much respect as you treat a man, you’ve got a problem.”
The show ran for a further six seasons without her, though she was back on board in 2008 for the first two seasons of a revived version, now called simply 90210 and populated largely by new, younger cast members.
More interesting was a further show, BH90210, which aired for a single season in 2019 and adopted a postmodern approach, following some of the original cast playing heightened versions of themselves as they try to get a reboot of the show off the ground. Doherty, who had initially been reluctant to participate, signed up after expressing a wish to honour Perry, who died in March 2019. (His death was mentioned in the first episode of BH90210.)
She was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and moved to southern California at the age of six with her mother, Rosa (nee Wright), who owned a beauty salon, and her father, Tom Doherty, who was a mortgage consultant. She was educated at the Lycée Français in Los Angeles. As a child, she convinced her parents to take her to acting auditions, and got her first television role in 1981, at the age of 10, on the drama Father Murphy.
The following year, she was a regular on the ninth and final season of the popular Little House on the Prairie and in three of that show’s subsequent TV specials. She had a recurring role on the drama Our House (1986-88) and appeared in films including the black comedy Heathers (1989) but later said she had struggled to find work during this period. “I got offered every horror film in the book, and I said ‘no’ to every single one of them because I wasn’t willing to compromise, to sacrifice the art.” Just in time, she auditioned successfully for Beverly Hills 90210.
After leaving the show, she played the lead in Kevin Smith’s ramshackle comedy Mallrats (1995). Savaged by critics, the film flopped but later found an enthusiastic following on video and DVD. She had more success on the long-running series Charmed, which began in 1998, and in which she played one of three sisters who fight evil using witchcraft; she also directed several episodes.
Her marriages to the actor Ashley Hamilton and the poker player Rick Salomon both ended in divorce. The preparations for her wedding to Kurt Iswarienko, her third husband, whom she married in 2011, were shown in detail on the eight-part reality TV show Shannen Says (2012), with the final episode featuring the ceremony itself. Doherty filed for divorce from Iswarienko last year.
Doherty was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015 but went into remission in 2018. It was in early 2020, in the midst of publicising her fight against insurers who refused to pay out for the damage to her house in Malibu from a wildfire in California, that she revealed the illness had returned and was now terminal, and in 2023 she announced that the cancer had spread to her brain.
She is survived by her mother, Rosa, and her older brother, Sean.
Shannen Maria Doherty, actor, born 12 April 1971; died 13 July 2024
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