Actor Shannen Doherty, who was best known for her roles in “Charmed” and “Beverly Hills, 90210,” died from stage 4 cancer on Saturday at the age of 53.
Doherty had a long and public battle with the disease. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015. She announced that she was in remission in 2017, but in 2020, she revealed to ABC News that the disease had returned. In June 2023, Doherty said that a scan earlier in the year showed that the cancer had metastasized to her brain. In November 2023, she made the sad revelation to People that the cancer had spread to her bones.
“I don’t want to die,” she told People at the time.
In an interview with Elle magazine in September 2020, Doherty said she would be in treatment for the rest of her life and would likely die from breast cancer. But “I’ve got a lot of life in me,” she added.
“I try to treasure all the small moments that most people don’t really see or take for granted,” Doherty told Elle. “The small things are magnified for me. We have this endless well within us, and it’s just about continuing to dig in that well for the strength to face adversity — and so that we can also see all the beauty.”
Doherty didn’t let her health stop her from working. Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, and only months after her breast cancer came back, she began filming the “90210” reboot “BH90210.”
Doherty was talked into doing the show by her close friend and former co-star, Brian Austin Green, when they were attending a memorial for actor Luke Perry, who died suddenly of a stroke in March 2019. Perry had played Doherty’s love interest on “90210,” and the two had reconnected not long before Perry’s death, with plans to work together again.
Although Doherty initially didn’t want to do the reboot, she ultimately decided to sign on as a tribute to Perry.
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“It was so weird for me to be diagnosed and then somebody who was seemingly healthy to go first,” she told ABC News. “It was really shocking and the least I could do to honor him was do that show. I still haven’t done enough in my opinion.”
Although Doherty played Jenny Wilder in “Little House on the Prairie” (1982-1983) and Heather Duke in “Heathers” (1988), she didn’t become a household name until she appeared on Aaron Spelling’s hit drama “Beverly Hills, 90210.”
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She and Perry played the endlessly dramatic, on-and-off couple Brenda Walsh and Dylan McKay from 1990 until Doherty was fired from the show in 1994.
Brenda and Dylan’s dramatic romance offered endless fodder for fans who discussed the relationship’s over-the-top storylines involving struggles with alcohol, parental abandonment, a prom dress scandal, a pregnancy scare, a love triangle with Kelly Taylor (Jennie Garth) and a “Romeo & Juliet”-inspired arc in which Brenda’s parents forbade her to see Dylan in Season 2, after the two snuck off to Mexico for a romantic rendezvous.
Their characters’ relationship was intense, and apparently so was Doherty’s behavior on the set of “90210,” which ignited her reputation as the ’90s quintessential Hollywood bad girl. Tabloid headlines at the time alleged that Doherty was heavily partying, continuously late to set and had an ongoing feud with her co-star Garth. (Garth admitted in her 2014 memoir, “Deep Thoughts From a Hollywood Blonde” that she and Doherty frequently “wanted to claw each other’s eyes out.”)
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In later years, Doherty admitted that she wasn’t the easiest person to work with, attributing that to her immaturity and dealing with her father’s myriad health issues.
“At 19 years old, diplomacy is not something that you understand,” she told Elle. She said that producers and directors on the set of “90210” treated her “like I’m a dog and I need to just follow their commands.”
“You don’t go, ‘Oh, how can I massage this?’ Instead, I was like, ‘Where’s my sledgehammer?’” she said. “But the more I used the sledgehammer to break that down, the worse it got for me.”
In 1998 — and after a role in Kevin Smith’s 1995 comedy “Mall Rats” — Doherty was cast by Spelling as Prue Halliwell in his WB series “Charmed.” The show centered on three sisters who were witches, and it became a hit for the network. Doherty left the show in 2001 after her character was killed off at the end of the third season.
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Rumors alleged that Spelling fired Doherty due to an ongoing feud with her co-star, Alyssa Milano. Decades later, Milano said the relationship between the two had become “cordial.”
And Doherty eventually made peace with her “90210” co-stars.
In 2016 — shortly after Doherty was diagnosed with breast cancer — the cast of “90210” attended an ’80s and ’90s-focused fan convention called REWindCon. Doherty couldn’t make it due to her illness, but Perry and Garth spoke warmly about her.
“None of us are up here today without Shannen,” Perry said at the conference. “She’s been through a lot. She’s not doing well right now, but sometimes her contributions are minimized.”
Perry added that Doherty was a big part of the reason “90210” became a smash hit, and said that Brenda and Dylan were his favorite couple of the series.
“She taught me a lot,” Perry added. “I’m glad she was my scene partner. She was great at what she did in the character with me.”
Around the same time, Garth posted a heartfelt message about Doherty on Instagram, calling her former co-star “the strongest lady i’ve ever known. then and now.”
Doherty also had a very close friendship with actor Sarah Michelle Gellar, and thought of Gellar and her children as her own family.
“They are now like my children,” Doherty told Entertainment Tonight in October 2020. “I love them madly. It’s even better than having my own children.”
The “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” star also praised her friend on Instagram after Doherty’s initial cancer diagnosis. In her post, she called Doherty “brave” and “one of the most loyal friends.”
Doherty married Kurt Iswarienko in 2011. She publicly gushed over the years about how supportive her spouse was throughout her illness and how he upheld his promise to stick by her in sickness and in health. However, in April 2023, her publicist said Doherty had filed for divorce, noting “she felt she was left with no other option.”