Shannen Doherty — the star of “Beverly Hills, 90210,” “Heathers,” and “Charmed,” among dozens of other credits — was a talented actress who immediately captured your attention on screen. Her black hair, green eyes, and slightly crooked nail polish made her stand out, as a child: no one looked like her. After that, her speech, along with her strong, sometimes odd cadence, made viewers lean in to pay attention. Doherty seemed constantly irritated; it was easy to assume that perhaps she it was upset.
Technology X lost an icon this weekend with the death of Doherty at age 53. She is the second cast member of “Beverly Hills, 90210” to die, after Luke Perry died of a stroke in 2019 at age 52. That’s two more, actually, but devoted listeners of Doherty’s “Let’s Be Clear” podcast, and I am one of them, may be feeling particularly confused and bereft right now. I listened not only as a journalist, observer and fan who found her fascinating since her explosive fame in the early ’90s — but as an acquaintance of Doherty’s who brought up cancer with her on a more personal level, having gone through my own cancer nightmare, with ovarian cancer.
On the June 23 episode of “Let’s Be Clear” — just three weeks ago — an emotional Doherty talked about how she was taking a new chemotherapy drug, an infusion, after having been on the medication for years. As she choked back tears, Doherty was candid about how scared she was. However, she also mentioned her hope, because her cancer cells had changed, and perhaps there are more protocols to try. “For the first time in probably a few months, I feel hopeful?” Doherty said in upspeak. “Because there are so many more protocols now. Whereas before, I was hopeful — but I was still preparing.”
Doherty’s hard-won optimism made the news of her loss of life all the more stunning. Her breast cancer returned in early winter 2019, this time as stage 4 metastatic cancer, which can be very serious; she even underwent brain surgery last year to remove lesions there. Yet no matter how dire things may have seemed, Doherty was still moving forward in her career: Last week, she and her former “Charmed” co-stars Holly Marie Combs, Brian Krause and Drew Fuller announced that she would be joining their “Home of Halliwell” revival podcast of the show, and they would be rebooting it with her.
The questions about what happened to Doherty’s cancer medication are small questions to ponder in the grand scheme of a life. Yet they are the ones I am concerned with at the moment. As a result, Shannen Doherty did not expect to die.
She leaves behind an intense legacy. Doherty’s family moved from Memphis, Tennessee, to Los Angeles when she was 7, and she began auditioning. Her first starring role was in the final season of “Little Home on the Prairie” at age 11, and she worked steadily from there.
In 1988’s “Heathers” — a film that achieved such cult status that it’s hard to remember how bad it was — Doherty played Heather Duke, who spouted lines like “Veronica, why are you pulling my dick?” And when Ryder’s Veronica asked why she needed to be a “mega-slut,” Doherty responded with her signature grin: “Because I could be.”
It was “Beverly Hills, 90210,” though, which premiered in 1990 to initially zero ratings, that launched Doherty into the stratosphere. The Fox teen soap, a true novelty at the time, revolved around Doherty’s Brenda and her twin Brandon (Jason Priestley) moving from Minnesota to Beverly Hills — and all the tradition-shattering that came with it. Brenda and Brandon were our guides into this thriving world, with its excesses and breakups that kids and young adults gathered weekly for years to observe together as a ritual. The hand-wringing over Brenda losing her virginity in Season 1 to Perry’s character, Dylan McKay, made national headlines and was seen by some (hilariously!) as a nervous breakdown-inducing end of civilization.
Written en masse, “90210” forged its own superstardom, and while I’m sure it wasn’t easy for any of them, the press particularly fixated on Doherty. She was probably doing what most other young girls in their early 20s were doing at the time, but she became a tabloid fixture, an infamous star of the pre-internet superstar press: She was an absolute devil, and she was truly spectacular to watch. She came of age simply because the paparazzi and gossip press, which 10 years later would pursue Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, among others, were beginning to spin ongoing narratives about younger girls as domestic disasters. Following Doherty’s antics was a sport — and it became mean. Real mean.
I first interviewed Doherty for Los Angeles Times in the late summer of 2008, when she was about to guest star on the CW’s “90210” reboot. She was hesitant to settle for an interview — she hated the press, understandably — but once we were in her trailer on set, we talked for hours. At the time, she was riding a wave of nostalgia that welcomed her back into the public eye, having receded after leaving “Charmed” in 2001. (The circumstances of her departure were murky at the time: Doherty made it clear that she was fired.)
“90210” was filming at a high school in El Segundo, and Doherty seemed nervous at first. But once she got going, she opened up about how her father’s health — he had been afflicted with multiple heart conditions since she was a child — had affected her just as “Beverly Hills, 90210” was hitting its stride, both through her “acting,” as she put it, and with more sensible issues like her persistent lateness. She went much further than I expected, revealing personal details, talking about her temporary marriage to the famous poker player Rick Salomon, who then became a public pervert, notorious for starring in and distributing his “One Night in Paris” sex tape with Paris Hilton. She brought it up out of nowhere, seemingly wanting to talk about it. “It ended up being very embarrassing for me, humiliating and disgusting,” Doherty said.
She seemed to need to clear up a lot of issues, mentioning them before I could even consider them. She seemed remorseful about her early fame and the way she handled the issues, without getting defensive. She got teary-eyed and choked up a few times as we talked, but she was also heartbreakingly funny.
We exchanged details—her e-mail address was her dog’s name—and went to dinner as soon as possible. She had been preoccupied with the Pasadena Journal, rather inexplicably, and asked if I wanted to work there. (I didn’t want to, but it was nice of her to offer.) We talked about our shared love of gambling—she was a professional craps player, she said—and mentioned meeting up in Las Vegas sometime. I had no illusions that this would happen: She was Shannen Doherty! We lost touch. Clearly.
After she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, I carefully adopted her treatment, which was easy to do since she documented it assiduously on Instagram. When she announced that she was in remission in April 2017, I was in my own cancer hell, having been diagnosed with ovarian cancer the previous summer. I DM’d her when she tweeted her great news, briefly sharing my own situation, and she wrote back, “So sorry to hear that. Are you happy with your doctors? Mine are amazing. I’ve saved so many. Researchers. Doctors. The best. I would be so happy to connect with you.” (It was a wonderful offer that I didn’t have to accept, thankfully.)
I interviewed her once again in September 2021 as part of Selection Ladies Energy Challenge, and he or she remembered I was sick, and we talked about cancer and chemotherapy, which are indescribable experiences. The story was about how prolific she had been that year as an actress, despite having stage 4 cancer: she had been in three movies back to back, and all she had to do was work. She had also directed a breast cancer PSA for Lifetime, and was determined to do more directing.
“One of the best examples I can follow to set for other people with most cancers, and for the skin world that doesn’t have most cancers,” Doherty then stated, “is to show them what a person affected by cancer looks like. We are employable.”
I was cheering her on from the sidelines as she listened to “Let’s Be Clear.” The topics were as diverse as she was, but I was always interested in them all. She interviewed her doctors about her medication — so enlightening for those of us who don’t have that kind of access to our oncologists — and she also had friends over like Sarah Michelle Gellar and director James Cullen Bressack. She chatted with people she’d worked with, like Priestley and Brian Austin Greene from “90210,” and “Mallrats” director Kevin Smith (they had a lot of love for each other, it seemed). And she had a cathartic reconciliation with Tori Spelling, during which they cleared the air about all the stuff that happened on “90210” that actually involved Spelling’s father, Aaron Spelling, the powerful producer.
Not everyone came away unscathed: She obliquely alluded to her “90210” enemies, without naming them, but it was easy enough to determine. And on “Charmed,” Doherty blamed Alyssa Milano for her ouster, and her good friend Holly Marie Combs agreed with her assessment. (Milano publicly denied having anything to do with it, causing Doherty to double down.)
Doherty would also talk to her mother, they would often talk about Shannen’s childhood and their lives together, and her illness too. I’m thinking particularly today about her mother, who she would call Mama Rosa. It would often just be Doherty, and she would talk about how terrified she was, and how outraged she was by this hand. But then she would recover, and get back up again. Her most recent visitor was Katherine Heigl, they would often bond over having stood up for themselves on sets, assertiveness that would then become distorted and misinterpreted to fit other people’s narratives of who they were.
There is no way to know how to end this essay, as she shouldn’t die now. The world is a lot less exciting without Shannen Doherty in it.