Shannen Doherty, star of ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’ and ‘Charmed,’ dies at 53

Shannen Doherty, a former child actor who went on to figure out one of the favourite teen programmes of the nineties, ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’, a high school drama, after battling with cancer for several years, passed away on Saturday.

Actress Shannen Doherty

has died of cancer, Her publicist, Leslie Sloane, said in a statement, “Yes, I have just learned that on Saturday, July 13, my client actress Shannen Doherty succumbed to cancer, the ailment which she had been battling for a long time. ”

She was 53.

Doherty was initially diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015 and went into remission in 2017. That reprieve wouldn’t last. Court papers for a lawsuit, which Doherty filed in February 2020, against the insurance firm over her home’s structure damage, indicated that she had advanced, terminal Stage 4 breast cancer.

‘It is a bitter swallow to some extent, indeed,’ Doherty said on ABC’s Good Morning America during the time. “It sure gets to be discouraging; there are days where I turn around and say to myself, ‘Why me?’ But then it hits me, ‘Why not me? Who else would deserve this?’ None of us. ”

In June 2023, she made an appeal on her Instagram, urging fans to donate and informing them that her cancer had progressed to her brain at the start.

In particular, having been diagnosed with Mets in her brain on January 5th, Doherty posted a video of her receiving radiation.
“My fear is apparent, you know I have claustrophobia. a lot was happening in my life,” Doherty replied. “But that fear, the inner turmoil, the timing of it all… This is what cancer looks like. ”

A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Doherty was born on April 12, 1971, to a shampooing mother whose beauty salon it was and a banking father. The young lady quickly arrived in Hollywood. It was when she was only 10, and by the time she was 10, she had ventured into acting, Her first acting assignment was in ‘Father Murphy’ which was a short-lived series that kicked off three years after her family relocated to Los Angeles.

Someone spotted the budding actress and the series producer who was Michael Landon hired her the following year for his popular series; Little House on the Prairie where she portrayed the adopted daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder for a period of 18 episodes.

It was followed by a lineup of roles, the major ones being a three-year shoot on the Wilford Brimley family drama “Our House” as one of the lead characters from 1986 to 1988 and a starring role in the 1989 dark comedy High school drama “Heathers.  

The biggest leap though came the following year with the introduction of the popular show “Beverly Hills, 90210” – the role for which she would be recognised in the span of her entire career. Doherty, who was 19 at the time, hit big in the early ’90s as the prim but quick-to-anger character Brenda Walsh as the show became the teenage rage.

But not all situations in the youth comedian’s life were as smooth as they should have been in a storyline. The actor, particularly in the movie, became a nuisance on the set and most probably had conflicts with members of the crew and other actors, especially Jennie Garth. The stories of this beautiful woman adorned the headlines of glamour magazines and the buzz of entertainment news programs.

“She was essentially the first ‘reality T. V. Celebrity’ before there were such things as actual T. V. celebrities. ” “It seemed like the actual life of Shannen Doherty and you can surround ‘actual’ with as many pairs of quotation marks as you’d like was two shows that ran simultaneously. ”

Doherty wanted out after the fourth season, while most of the series’ other principal actors, including Garth, hung on for another six seasons.

Doherty said to Entertainment Weekly in 2008: “The best thing that ever could have happened to me was, I got off ‘90210’ when I did. ” “It let me really find a little bit of peace and I finally started to discover who I was as a person.

Not the person that the press made me out to be… You know I had a few bad things happen in my personal life… I was trying to figure out what a bad husband and a bad boyfriend were, and I doing it under the eye of the public. I wasn’t coping very well at all… I really wasn’t

Actor Jason Priestley, who appeared in the TV series alongside Doherty, stated his shock at her death through his Twitter, calling her a quite forceful personality and himself admitting that he ‘will miss her’.

She got a few more movie roles in the middle of the decade, one of which was in Kevin Smith’s R-rated comedy often referred to as ‘Mallrats’; however, her career did not look as bright as it did in the early nineties. That is until she kisses and makes up with “90210” producer Aaron Spelling, in order that she may obtain a starring position within the immensely common supernatural drama “Charmed” with Alyssa Milano and Holly Marie Combs. It appeared that performing as a witch reignited the witch in her as it did earlier —

until she left three seasons before the show wrapped up. She was able to direct three episodes out of all the episodes before she was shown leaving the show.

The news of her death was succeeded by a statement from her Charmed co-star Milano.

“Shannen and I were not always the best of friends; in fact, we had our fair share of problems When you put aside the rivalry that we had on the set, we were the best of friends. I had tremendous respect for Shannen, and I used to admire her very much,” Milano said. “Actress, successful, and kind, hopefully, with those attributes, the world is not such a bad place without her. My condolences to all those who knew her. ”

By the dawn of the twenty-first century, she was skipping from one short-lived television show to another, By the middle of 2006, she metamorphosed into real-life television hosting, a show known as Breaking up with Shannen Doherty, In the show, she assisted people to leave their unhealthy relationships.

That seemed to be a subject Doherty knew well, coming off two divorces: she got married to Ashley Hamilton, son to actor George Hamilton, in 1993, but the marriage was dissolved in 1994, and the other to Rick Salomon, whose marriage was annulled in 2002 just nine months after the joining of the teams.

Doherty also separated from her third husband, a photographer named Kurt Iswarienko. The couple was married in April 2011, and she filed for divorce in April 2023.