Shannen Doherty was just 19 when she made her debut in the lead role of Brenda Walsh on Beverly Hills, 90210, but she had already lived out an entire narrative arc as an actor. A child star, she began her career with wholesome roles such as Jenny Wilder in Little House on the Prairie and Kris Witherspoon on two seasons of family drama Our House. After working through a series of such characters throughout the 1980s, it was her supporting role in the 1989 teenage black comedy Heathers that showed she had range, playing a scheming mean girl more obsessed with her looks and social standing than anything resembling human decency.
By the time she arrived on 90210 in 1990, she was set to play out this arc again as Brenda Walsh, and likely quite unaware of the life-changing consequences to come. Arriving into the belly of the Californian beast from Minnesota with her brother Brandon, Brenda makes numerous naive and moralistic choices throughout the course of the show’s first season. But by the fourth – Doherty’s final season – she emerges as a complex and problematic young figure, seen by many as a prototypical girl gone bad.
As Doherty acquired a mass following for playing easy-to-hate characters, she became the subject of intense public scrutiny and numerous eye-popping accusations: an allegation made by her one-time fiance and Max Factor heir Dean Factor that she had tried to kill him, reports of a distastefully extravagant lifestyle, and claims of clashes and physical fights with her co-stars on set. By then, even many fans of Doherty’s 90210 character were revolting; a national I Hate Brenda newsletter was created by punk zinesters Darby Romeo and Kerin Morataya, complete with a hotline people could call to rant about how much they hated Walsh. In a 1993 piece in the Chicago Tribune, Morataya offered a common criticism that seemed to conflate Walsh and Doherty, complaining of the former: “We love everyone else on the show except her. We hate her. She pretends to be so moralistic. In reality, she’s not.”
In retrospect it is easy to see that Doherty and Brenda Walsh became, to borrow a phrase from podcaster and writer Sarah Marshall, one of the maligned women of the 90s: a victim of sexism and misogyny who had reached dizzying heights of celebrity before she was even old enough to legally drink. Willingly or not, she became a repository of the public’s emotions, at a time when young women reached for greater levels of personal and bodily autonomy.
Much of Doherty’s life after 90210 was coloured by those tumultuous years. After achieving another hit role as witch Prue Halliwell on the action drama Charmed, Doherty again left a popular and lucrative position amid eerily similar reports of an on set feud, this time with co-star Alyssa Milano. From there Doherty would twice reprise her character Brenda Walsh, star in three reality shows and appear in an ill-fated TV version of Heathers that never made it to air.
She remained defiant even after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, then again when it returned years later. She reprised the role of Walsh in 2019 in the second reboot of her hit show, BH90210, at the time framing it as proof that even a woman battling stage four cancer could still act. One might also imagine that it was a way of letting the haters know that Walsh was her character, and she would claim her without shame or hesitation, in spite of the hatefest three decades prior.
Doherty revisited the on set controversies around 90210 and Charmed on her 2023 podcast Let’s Be Clear, which debuted as she was in the throes of terminal cancer that had spread to her bones and brain. Inviting the likes of Charmed’s Holly Marie Combs and 90210’s Tori Spelling to attempt to clear the air and set the story straight, the podcast offered moments of contrition and recalcitrance, as well as opportunities to publicly reconcile with numerous figures from her past. The show seemed in many ways to be a preparation for the end she must have known was imminent.
On the very last episode of her podcast, released a week before her death, Doherty broke the news that she would be joining Combs on the podcast House of Halliwell for a rewatch of Charmed. Seemingly worried about being hated again, she told Combs, “I worry about … people’s reaction. Are they going to say, ‘Wow, it was so much better without Shannen’? But it’s because I’m always expecting rejection, or shame, or something.”
It was a reminder of the lifelong impacts of her experiences in the ’90s, as well as the risk she confronted by frequently returning to her work in that era. It was a moment of vulnerability and authenticity that she, regrettably, did not receive enough credit for throughout her career – her life a hard-won victory against the forces that had victimised her.
