Shannen Doherty, 53, actress of “Charmed” and “Beverly Hills, 90210,” passes away

After battling breast cancer for a number of years, Shannen Doherty, a young actress who rose to fame in the 1990s while starring in the high school drama “Beverly Hills, 90210,” passed away on Saturday.
“Actress Shannen Doherty passed away, and I confirm this with sorrowful heart. After battling the illness for many years, she lost her struggle with cancer on Saturday, July 13, according to Doherty’s spokeswoman Leslie Sloane. 53 was her age.

Doherty went into remission two years after receiving her first breast cancer diagnosis in 2015. That relief was just temporary. According to court records in a case Doherty filed in February 2020 against her insurance provider for house damage, she was “dying” from Stage 4 breast cancer, which had spread to the point of incurability.
During the episode of “Good Morning America” on ABC, Doherty said, “It’s a bitter pill to swallow in a lot of ways.” “I do have days when I ask myself, ‘Why me?’” I then ask myself, “Well, why not me?” I mean, who else deserves this except me? Not one of us does.
She revealed on Instagram in June 2023 that she had brain metastases from her disease at the start of the year.
In the description of a video of herself getting radiotherapy, Doherty said, “On January 5th, my scan showed Mets in my brain.”
“It’s clear that I’m afraid. Doherty said, “I had a lot going on in my life and I am very claustrophobic. “But this is how cancer can look—the fear, the turmoil, the timing of it all.”
Doherty arrived in Hollywood quickly after being born in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 12, 1971. Her father was employed at a bank, while her mother ran a beauty shop. Three years after her family relocated to Los Angeles, she made her acting debut at the age of ten on the brief television series “Father Murphy.”
After seeing the budding actress, series producer Michael Landon decided to cast her as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s adoptive daughter for an 18-episode run on his popular program “Little House on the Prairie” the following year.
This exposure resulted in a string of parts, such as a three-year stint (1986–1988) as a lead in the Wilford Brimley family drama “Our House” and a main role in the 1989 high school dark comedy “Heathers.”
The debut of “Beverly Hills, 90210,” the part she would be associated with for the rest of her life, would provide her with her greatest break the following year. Playing the straitlaced but feisty Brenda Walsh in the early 1990s, Doherty, then 19 years old, shot to fame and the program became a guilty pleasure for a generation.
But for Doherty, things weren’t always going as planned. The actor gained a reputation for being difficult to deal with on the set and was said to have feuded with many members of the staff and cast, most notably Jennie Garth, who was his co-star. She became as notorious as she was renowned because to the headlines in celebrity glossies and the tense broadcasts on entertainment news programs.
“She turned into a parable reality-TV celebrity before there were real reality-TV celebrities,” said Robert Thompson, the director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. “It seemed as if two programs were airing simultaneously featuring the genuine Shannen Doherty—you can put six sets of quotation marks around the term “real.”
The majority of the other leads on the program, including Garth, continued for a further six seasons when Doherty departed following the fourth season.
“Leaving ‘90210’ at the right time was the best thing that could have happened to me,” Doherty said to Entertainment Weekly in 2008. It helped me develop my own identity and achieve a little amount of serenity. Not the person the media painted me as because I had gone through some difficult times in my personal life, was having trouble identifying a poor partner or spouse, and was doing it in public, so I wasn’t handling any of it well. Actually, I wasn’t. And I am aware of it.
Jason Priestley, Doherty’s co-star, expressed his grief on social media upon learning of her passing, writing that she was “a force of nature and I will miss her.”
Her career didn’t show the potential it had a few years earlier, although she would go on to have a few more movie appearances in the middle of the decade, notably in filmmaker Kevin Smith’s R-rated comedy “Mallrats.” That is, up until she made up and got back together with producer Aaron Spelling of “90210” in order to get a leading part in the well-liked supernatural serial series “Charmed,” costarring Alyssa Milano and Holly Marie Combs. For the three seasons she was on the program before departing again before its run ended, becoming a witch appeared to bring back the power she had before. Three of the last episodes she starred in were directed by her.
Milano, Doherty’s co-star in “Charmed,” released a statement after learning of her passing.
“I had a complicated relationship with Shannen, but at the heart of it was someone I deeply respected and was in awe of,” Milano remarked. The world is a poorer place without her, since she was a gifted actress who was adored by many. I’m sorry to everyone who knew and loved her.
She alternated between brief television shows during the start of the twenty-first century, and by 2006, she had made the transition to true reality television as presenter of “Breaking Up With Shannen Doherty,” where she assisted viewers in ending unhealthy relationships.
Having gone through two divorces, Doherty seemed to be well-versed on that topic: Her marriage to Ashley Hamilton, the actor George Hamilton’s son, ended in divorce in 1994. Her marriage to Rick Salomon, which took place nine months after the wedding, was annulled in 2002. Doherty filed for divorce from photographer Kurt Iswarienko, her third spouse, in April 2023. The couple wed in 2011.
However, acquaintances report that Doherty became less eccentric as he got older. She would return to her iconic role as Brenda Walsh twice: first for a lengthy cameo on the 2008 revival of “90210,” and again in the 2019 dramedy “BH90210,” in which the original cast members came back to portray made-up versions of themselves in a bid to bring back the popular program.
According to Thompson, the reason she continued returning to the character voluntarily was not only because she could never shake the part’s allure.
She is the second prominent “Beverly Hills, 90210” cast member to pass away young; Luke Perry passed away in March 2019 after complications from a stroke.

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