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Shannen Doherty, who has died at the age of 53 following years of living with cancer, was an actor famous for playing women to whom respect wasn’t immediately granted.
Her Nineties TV hits Beverly Hills, 90210 and Charmed – shows embraced by generations of young people growing up both then and now – cast her as characters who, to the unenlightened among us, could be read as bitches or mean girls, those annoying descriptors always levelled at women too complicated and interesting to be boxed in simplistically. But as a skilled if often underrated actor, she was deft at conveying pride and regret beneath the surface grumpiness, the feeling of women only being a certain way because the world has made them that way.
Doherty was also one of the OG tabloid fixtures, a child star gone berserk (not really), whose club-hopping and on-set lateness apparently warranted round-the-clock coverage at the top of the Nineties. She experienced the kind of wrath that could only have existed back then – regular headlines in the National Enquirer that weren’t ignored at the supermarket checkout line but actually had an impact on her career; a popular newsletter for pre-internet teens who could come together every month to talk about how much they hated Doherty and Brenda Walsh, the mouthy teen she played on 90210.
She has since admitted to being incredibly hurt by all of this – it contributed to her firing from 90210 in 1994 – but it did at least add to the lore that surrounded her. Doherty was sharp and icy and a tiny bit dangerous – all the things despised by the boring among us, and oddly irresistible to those who secretly wanted to be like that themselves.
Doherty was also incredibly glamorous, stomping around with the force of a supermodel and with black hair so shiny that you can imagine millions of women over the decades bouncing between box dyes trying to emulate it just right. I adored watching her on-screen, the sense that she was always just on the cusp of slapping someone – as part of a clique of cruel teens in the Winona Ryder classic Heathers, say, or as the pissed-off girlfriend in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats. She is brilliant on Charmed, as the eldest in a trio of sister witches, who understood the weight of her duty to protect the innocent. Prue Halliwell was cool, responsible, complex and always inappropriately dressed for battle but pfft – who says you couldn’t kill a demon in a belly shirt and a mini-skirt?
I loved how much Doherty gave to incredibly bad made-for-television movies, too. Friends ‘Til the End, from 1997, saw her play an aspiring musician (the tracks sound like Cranberries knock-offs and Doherty’s voice has an air of Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles) being stalked by her best friend. Satan’s School for Girls (2000) cast her as an undercover reporter investigating evil witches on a university campus. Blindfold: Acts of Obsession, from 1994, is the kind of erotic thriller so devoid of eroticism that it becomes almost hypnotic. But Doherty is good in all of them, always magnetic and spirited and salvaging whatever she can from dismal scripts.
Since 2023, Doherty had hosted her own podcast – Let’s Be Clear – a kind of audio autobiography going over her work, her personal life and her health. Tales of her cancer journey – she was diagnosed in 2015 with breast cancer, which went into remission and then returned, then spread to her brain and bones in 2023 – were sobering and moving. Doherty was reluctant to pretty up what has been a life-affirming if undeniably painful time. But the most fascinating episodes were ones in which she conversed with Hollywood women equally hurt by an industry that has only ever celebrated female compliance, and only begrudgingly those who march to the beat of their own drum.
She had a natural kinship with the likes of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Katherine Heigl, Tori Spelling and Christina Ricci, all of whom appeared on the show. Like her, they are actors who arrived in Hollywood as children, grew up in the spotlight and found themselves permanently shackled to misogynist speculation about their characters: they were too difficult, too unpredictable, too eager to have a voice on chaotic sets.
Doherty never claimed total innocence, happy to admit to sometimes reading the room wrong, or getting defensive rather than looking for a compromise during arguments. But her cancer also provided her with a sense of clarity about her past – the things she should apologise for, and the things she absolutely shouldn’t. She put to bed years of speculation about what happened on the set of Charmed – she was fired after significant on-set tensions with her co-star Alyssa Milano, a feud inflamed by male producers – and spoke eloquently about the relationships she regretted and the domestic violence she experienced while working on 90210.
It was often quite beautiful – here is a woman who knew she was dying, but wouldn’t go quietly or with unfinished business. She was funny, sassy, a little intimidating. It was Doherty to a tee. What fool would expect any different?
