Shannen Doherty

Info

Full Name: Shannen Maria Doherty
Date of birth: April 12, 1971
Location: Memphis, Tennessee
Country: USA
Died at: 53 years old (July 13, 2024)
Redes sociales: X Facebook Instagram

Shannen Doherty died 2 years ago, on July 13, 2024. Their last recorded film was in 2019, and their first in 1982. They were active for 37 years, appearing in 6 films that averaged a rating of 6.2/10.

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Biography

In 1993 somebody in Los Angeles published a fanzine whose only purpose was to insult a 22 year old actress. 'I Hate Brenda' sold more than seven thousand copies and spun off a book. Thirty one years later, when Shannen Doherty died on 13 July 2024 at 53, the same industry that had made a sport of her spent a week talking about how honest she had been about dying. The distance between those two moments is more or less the story of her life.

She was born in Memphis on 12 April 1971 and moved to California as a small child with her Southern Baptist family. She went to the Lycée Français in Los Angeles and was working professionally before she turned eleven.

Michael Landon spotted her in an episode of 'Father Murphy' and brought her onto 'Little House on the Prairie', where she played Jenny Wilder between 1982 and 1983. That same year came her first film work, voicing Teresa in 'The Secret of NIMH'.

Her teens went on television, until 'Heathers' came along in 1988. As Heather Duke she was the second of the rich girls terrorising the school, opposite Winona Ryder and Christian Slater. It flopped in cinemas and became a cult film later.

Brenda Walsh

'Beverly Hills, 90210' started in October 1990 and changed the scale of everything. Doherty played Brenda Walsh, the girl from Minnesota who lands in a Beverly Hills school with her twin brother and never quite fits. Brenda's on and off romance with the Dylan of Luke Perry was the most discussed thing on teen television for about four years.

Off screen the tabloids turned her into the definitive out of control young star. Bar fights, lawsuits, one front page after another, and that fanzine.

She left the show in 1994, at the end of the fourth season, and never pretended it had been her choice. The difficult label followed her for the rest of her career, and she always maintained she had picked it up simply by speaking up for herself in her early twenties.

What survives from those years is a cameo as herself in 'Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult' (1994) and, above all, 'Mallrats' (1995), where Kevin Smith cast her as Rene. Smith became a friend and kept giving her work for the next thirty years.

Prue Halliwell and the difficult label

The second act arrived in 1998 with 'Charmed'. She was Prue, eldest of three witch sisters, with Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano alongside her. It sold around the world and she ended up directing three episodes of it.

Again she lasted three seasons. She was gone by 2001 and Prue was killed off in the finale, with the show writing in a fourth sister played by Rose McGowan.

In 2024, already very ill, she gave her version on the podcast she had started. She and Combs said a producer had told them Milano threatened to sue over a hostile working environment and that it came down to one or the other. Milano denied it publicly, saying she never had the power to get anyone fired.

The work after that was patchy. She played herself in 'Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back' (2001), turned up in 'Domino' (2005) for Tony Scott and Keira Knightley, hosted shows and made television films.

Brenda Walsh never let go. She was back in the spin off '90210' (2008), in 'BH90210' (2019), the odd revival in which the original cast played versions of themselves, and in an episode of 'Riverdale' in 2020, as a tribute to Luke Perry, who had died the year before.

Nine years of cancer

The diagnosis came in March 2015 and she made it public that summer. It was breast cancer that had already reached a lymph node. Mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and reconstruction followed.

She also sued her former business managers, arguing that a lapse in her health insurance on their watch had delayed the diagnosis. In April 2017 she announced she was in remission.

It didn't hold. In February 2020 she said the cancer was back and was stage 4. In January 2023 she had surgery on a brain tumour, went through more radiation, and by November knew it had reached her bones.

None of it was hidden. She posted the video of herself in the radiation mask, the shaved head, the bad days. In December 2023 she launched the podcast 'Let's Be Clear', where she went back over her career with old colleagues and talked about dying without any padding, and she kept recording almost to the end.

Her private life had less luck. She married three times: the actor Ashley Hamilton between 1993 and 1994, Rick Salomon in 2002 in a marriage annulled after nine months, and the photographer Kurt Iswarienko in 2011. She filed for divorce in 2023 and signed the settlement on 12 July 2024, a day before she died, having accused him in court papers of dragging the process out while he waited for her to go.

She lost her Malibu house in the Woolsey fire in 2018.

On the podcast she left instructions. No burial. Cremation, and her ashes mixed with her father's, who died in 2010, and with those of her German shepherd Bowie when the time came. Scattered in Malibu, somewhere she and her dad had loved. A small funeral.

She was the mean girl in a fictional school, the eldest of three witches and, at the end, one of the clearest public voices on what it is like to live with a cancer that will not go away. Not bad for someone who spent twenty years being asked only about her arguments.