Remembering Shannen Doherty, the Quintessential Gen X Girl

Shannen Doherty epitomized the experience of growing up female in the ’90s. Like her iconic Beverly Hills, 90210 character, Brenda Walsh, she contained a volatile mix of Gen X angst, teen fragility and feminist grit. She thrived as a porcelain-skinned, dark-haired drama queen in a world of tan, blonde valley girls, and owned her identity as an angry young woman before Courtney Love and Elizabeth Wurtzel made it a trend. She wasn’t for everyone, but that was part of her appeal.

Celebrity was not always kind to Doherty, who died on July 13 at age 53 after a nine-year struggle with breast cancer. Though she’d been acting professionally for a decade when Fox’s 90210 debuted in 1990, the actor rocketed to full-on fame as the pioneering teen soap about social politics at West Beverly High slowly rose in the ratings. Tabloids sank their fangs into the young, photogenic cast, slotting Doherty—who was still 19 when the show premiered—into the role of villain. Called out for her partying, her tumultuous romantic relationships and her reportedly imperious behavior on set, she was let go from the long-running drama after four seasons.

“I was 21 years old, trying to grow up and figure out who I was,” Doherty explained to TIME in 1998. “I didn’t consciously think, ‘Maybe I should be real low-key and stay in my house.’ Instead I was like, ‘I’m 21 and I can go out and have a great time and experience the whole college life.’” In retrospect, the typically self-aware actor concluded that she had made herself an “easy target.” With the hindsight of a few additional decades, it also seems clear that the media had been excessively hard on a young woman coming of age in front of paparazzi flashbulbs.

Despite producer Aaron Spelling and creator Darren Star’s attempts to replace Brenda with other brunette troublemakers, the show was never the same without Doherty. 90210’s teenage characters had begun their lives as antiquated teen-movie stereotypes: Brenda’s twin brother, Brandon, was the all-American golden boy; Kelly, the pretty queen bee; Steve, the fratty bro; Donna, the sweetheart; David, the annoying little brother. Luke Perry’s motorcycle-riding bad boy was James Dean with a trust fund. Doherty was the first to make her character—conceived as a self-conscious Midwestern transplant—into something more authentic and contemporary.

Infused with Doherty’s preternatural fire, Brenda became a moody brat, yes, but also an earnest romantic who channeled her overabundance of feelings into a love affair with theater. Her self-righteous smirk, withering glare and wide, mischievous grin captured the emotional extremes of adolescence to an extent that words could never quite express. In the early ’90s, after a decade that saw a massive right-wing backlash to the gains of second-wave feminism, America was waking up to the rage of a new generation of women. Not long after 90210 emerged, female-dominated punk bands like L7, Bikini Kill and Hole stormed the rock mainstream—and Doherty’s performance began to look not just inspired, but also prescient.

Those girl-power undertones didn’t stop Brenda from battling Kelly (Jennie Garth, also rumored to be Doherty’s biggest behind-the-scenes rival) for Dylan in one of the show’s most memorable storylines. When she lost her virginity with him at the end of Season 1, local affiliates blasted the producers over the consequence-free depiction of teen sex. Looking back on the characters’ relationship in a 2008 interview with the New York Times, Doherty recalled “how messed up, sometimes, it could be, but ultimately there was love between them, and then eventually they grew apart.” For her, their romance was a funny, ultimately humane tale of a girl trying too hard to become the person she thinks her boyfriend wants her to be. “It’s kind of a good lesson,” she noted, “just be yourself and be comfortable in your own skin.” Four decades in Hollywood seemed to have led the actor, who was open about her mistakes, to a similar conclusion.

Born in Memphis, Tenn. on April 12, 1971, Doherty lived below the Mason-Dixon line for long enough to absorb Southern Baptist values fostered by her mother Rosa’s side of the family. When she was six, her parents moved Shannen and her older brother, Sean, to Los Angeles, where her father, Tom, had bought a trucking company. Though their fortunes fluctuated throughout her childhood, she soon discovered her talent for acting in a church production of Snow White. In 1982, the same year she voiced Teresa Brisby in the animated classic The Secret of NIMH, she nabbed the role of Jenny Wilder in Little House on the Prairie. “That show changed my life,” Doherty told People in a 1992 cover story, recalling the advice its executive producer and star Michael Landon gave her: “Always stick up for yourself. Never let anybody walk all over you.”

By the mid-’80s, Doherty had aged into the decade’s booming teen culture, racking up Young Artist Award nominations for roles in long-forgotten shows like Our House, as well as starring in the silly flick Girls Just Want to Have Fun alongside Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt. Viewers got their first glimpse of her mean-girl swagger in 1989’s Heathers, the cult black comedy that cast her as one of three identically named preppies who rule their high school with manicured fists. A wickedly funny funeral scene finds Doherty’s Heather Duke, decked out in a big hat and opera gloves, grinning beatifically as she thanks Jesus for the death of her friend.

For better or worse, it was 90210 that defined her public life after 1990, spawning anti-fanzines and punk singles that proclaimed their hatred of Brenda and earning Doherty a “difficult” reputation that she never lived down. But she did have fun with her image in the indie movies she made after leaving the show; Doherty is incandescent as an aggrieved girlfriend in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats and hilarious in a brief role as a day-glo ditz in Gregg Araki’s Nowhere.

Controversy followed her to the WB’s Charmed, a breezy supernatural drama also produced by Spelling, where for three seasons beginning in 1998 she turned in feisty performances as the eldest of three unfeasibly attractive witch sisters. Amid reports of clashes with co-star Alyssa Milano, Doherty’s character was killed off and Rose McGowan signed on to replace her.

Doherty was in and out of the spotlight after that, appearing in the short-lived 2004 Fox soap North Shore and, two years later, hosting an Oxygen reality show called Breaking Up With Shannen Doherty, in which she helped wannabe singles dump their significant others. Despite her abrupt exit from Beverly Hills, the franchise came calling again in 2008, with the CW reboot 90210. And she agreed to reprise the role of Brenda—now a famous stage actor—in a guest arc. “I didn’t want it to be like she was still stuck in high school with the same attitude,” Doherty told the Times in 2008, explaining that she had vetted the producers’ new vision for Brenda to ensure that the character had evolved. “Although I don’t think Brenda was mean, she reacted to the things that were happening around her, and she reacted as a teenager does.”

Following brief marriages to Ashley Hamilton (the son of George Hamilton) in 1993 and Rick Salomon (the poker pro best known for co-starring in Paris Hilton’s sex tape) in 2002, Doherty settled down with photographer Kurt Iswarienko in 2011; WE tv reality show Shannen Says chronicled their wedding preparations. Yet tragedy struck in 2015, when Doherty was diagnosed with breast cancer. After a brief remission, she revealed on Good Morning America in February 2020 that her cancer was back and she’d been living with a stage 4 diagnosis for a year. “I don’t think that I’ve processed it yet. It’s a bitter pill to swallow,” she said in the tearful interview. “There are definitely days where I say, ‘Why me?’ And then I go, ‘Well, why not me? Who else?’” Still going strong that fall, Doherty reflected on her life with unprecedented vulnerability in a widely read Elle profile. After an honest internal reckoning, she explained, “what I came out with was, I have good karma. It may not seem like it, but I’ve been a really good human being.”

Doherty got a final opportunity to revisit Brenda Walsh—and prove she could laugh at herself—in 2019’s deeply self-aware BH90210, a silly but mostly fun meta-revival on Fox that had the original cast playing exaggerated versions of themselves. In storylines caricatured from real life, Shannen was the free-spirited, post-fame holdout, and the one whose paycheck was the envy of her castmates. On Entertainment Tonight, Doherty explained that she’d decided to participate as a tribute to Luke Perry, who had died following a stroke that March. “Replaying Brenda was something I said I wouldn't do twice and I've replayed her now twice, so I guess I could never say I'm never going to do something again because I end up doing it,” she said. “As [Perry’s] on-set family, I felt like it was an important time for all of us to come together to honor him.”

That both actors would die young feels tragic enough to come from the melodramatic mind of the character from whom Doherty’s identity proved so inextricable. It’s a small consolation that we’ll remember them at their most romantic, as two teenage rebels with the world at their feet.