Nobody Could Break Shannen Doherty, and Everybody Tried

Rest in peace, Shannen Doherty — the quintessential Hollywood bad girl of the Nineties, the Heather-est of the Heathers. Doherty made her legend on Beverly Hills, 90210, the best TV teen drama ever by a mile, playing teenage chaos agent and drama factory Brenda Walsh. The world is mourning the news of Doherty’s death, at only 53, after an agonizing, nine-year, public battle with cancer. Yet she faced her health struggles with the same fighting spirit she brought to everything she did. Doherty was always defiantly herself, America’s nightmare of a Difficult Girl, which made her the most vilified celebrity of her time. But she wore it proudly. “I have a rep,” she said in 2010. “Did I earn it? Yeah, I did.”

She always had that wonderfully cocky grin, from 90210 to her Let’s Be Clear podcast. It was that grin, more than anything, that made her controversial. It wasn’t her brief marriages or her “difficult” work rep or her tabloid feuds that made her Hollywood’s most hated woman — it was the smile, her cool self-satisfied look of knowing she was the shit. That’s what America could not forgive her for — she loved being Shannen Doherty and refused to apologize for it. Nothing she went through, even in her final years, could break that grin. 

She blew up right before the Nineties explosion of feminist pop culture, as the Alanis/Fiona/Courtney/Missy/Liz/Left Eye revolution took off. She was the jagged little pill that America could not swallow, and it got her crucified in public. But it’s why so many of us idolized her.

In Heathers, Winona Ryder’s Veronica Sawyer asks, “Why do you have to be such a mega-bitch?” Doherty, as queen bee Heather Duke replies, “Because I can be.” Only Doherty could give that line such a stiletto twist.

I saw her last year making a rare public appearance at a Nineties pop-culture fan convention in Florida. She had the longest lines at her autograph booth — fans told me they’d camped out for hours before her sessions even started. Everybody knew she was battling cancer, so it was emotional to see the crowd erupt when she came out for a Charmed reunion panel, saying that she was “feeling great,” holding court with that same cocky smile. She also refused to take part in the Beverly Hills, 90210 reunion panel, featuring almost all her castmates, even though she was right there in the building — she scheduled an autograph session while it was happening. What a Brenda Walsh power move.

Even before 90210, Doherty was ferocious. She was just 17 when she became one of the all-time-great movie supervillains in Heathers, as the high-school mean girl Heather Duke. It was supposed to be a star vehicle for Winona and Christian Slater, but Shannen steals it, especially in the funeral scene. She’s dressed to kill, in black gloves and a royal-wedding hat. She kneels by the casket to pray over her dead friend’s body. “I prayed for the death of Heather Chandler many times,” she tells the Lord. “And I felt bad every time I did it, but I kept doing it anyway. Now I know you understood everything. Praise Jesus! Hallelujah!” Her sadistic smirk is still shocking after all these years.

Doherty was a child actress, appearing in Little House on the Prairie when she was 11, alongside frontier patriarch Michael Landon. She credited him for inspiring her combative streak. “He told me, ‘Go with your instinct, and never let anybody walk over you, and always stick up for what you believe in,’” she once said. She stood out as a sassy little sister in the bizarrely underrated masterpiece Girls Just Want to Have Fun, one of the Eighties’ best teen movies (which also featured Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt).

But she became a household name with Beverly Hills, 90210. “This receptionist told me, ‘What you have done for brunettes is amazing,’” Doherty told Rolling Stone in a 1992 cover story. “‘It’s always the blondes that get the guy, who have the wonderful life, who are perceived as the most beautiful one. And you have totally turned it around.” Brenda and her twin brother Brandon (Jason Priestley) had just moved to Beverly Hills from Minnesota. The Walshes were an innocent Midwest family dropped into the decadent SoCal fleshpots, where her mom fretted, “You didn’t wear this much makeup in Minnesota.”

The joke was that Shannen didn’t have a drop of Minnesota in her — her family was from Memphis, but she grew up in L.A., with showbiz written all over her face. “I dress more for my figure than Brenda does,” she said to Rolling Stone, explaining why she wore a bodysuit to the interview. “She’d probably put a dress over this bodysuit to hide herself. Brenda’s more apple pie, girl next door, America’s sweetheart.” That wasn’t Doherty’s style. Her glamour was more suited to the L.A. shoulder-pads era — she made a fantastic hair-metal muse in a video for the band Slaughter’s power ballad “Real Love.” Brenda was originally scripted as the nice, wholesome heroine, but Shannen turned it around with her sheer force of personality. Brenda had drama with practically everyone at West Beverly Hills High School, dating the bad boy Dylan. (Luke Perry tragically died of a stroke in 2019, only 52, a year younger than Doherty.) Jennie Garth played her best friend Kelly, yet they famously despised each other; one on-set brawl got so intense that Brian Austin Green had to break it up. (Green and Doherty had a laugh about this last year on her podcast.) The tension blew up with the Brenda/Dylan/Kelly love triangle. Dylan and Kelly try to keep it secret, until the legendary scene when Brenda catches them at a restaurant. Naturally she turns an awkward public encounter into World War 3, snarling, “Kelly, if you’re trying to lose your bimbo image, I honestly don’t think this will help.” If you doubt her greatness as an actor, watch her in this scene: She was a genius at hostile eye contact. Doherty made it a classic TV moment — even though Dylan really did belong with Kelly, sorry.

Brenda became the most hated character on TV. The zine Ben Is Dead did a spinoff called I Hate Brenda, with lines like “Shannen: The Other White Meat” and fantasies about Ted Nugent bow-hunting her. Plus a spinoff album full of bangers like “Brenda Can’t Dance To This” and the sensual slow jam “Horny Brenda.” It came with an “I Hate Brenda” T-shirt riddled with bloody bullet holes. When Doherty hosted Saturday Night Live in 1993, it became a horrifyingly misogynistic get-the-guest episode, sadly typical of that SNL era. In one sketch, Doherty was in the dock at the Salem Bitch Trials, with the whole cast chanting, “Burn the bitch!” (When Luke Perry hosted SNL, one of the first jokes in his monologue was “Be nice or I’ll get Shannen after you.”)

The tabloids were obsessed with her public fights, especially when she battled with Paris Hilton over Rick Salomon, Doherty’s ex from a quickie Vegas marriage. When her name came up on The Simple Life, Hilton just sniffed, “I hate that girl.”

Doherty was the bad conscience of Nineties girlhood, which was why America was so fascinated with the idea of hating her. Like Brenda, she was judged by ridiculously hypocritical double standards, sexualized and then demonized for it. She was about one-sixth as destructive as your average Hollywood male star of the time, yet she was the one constantly on trial for being everybody’s worst-case-scenario of a messy girl in public, prosecuted in her own real-life Salem Bitch Trials. Yet she refused to back down or play nice. This bitch would not burn.The 1992 ABC TV movie Obsessed is largely forgotten now — it’s total trash, but Doherty is brilliant in it. Her character spends the movie stalking her ex, who is (of all people) Seventies character actor William Devane, who was in McCabe & Mrs. Miller before she was born. (When this movie comes out, she’s 21, he’s 53 — 2.5 times her age.) Naturally, the movie presents him as an innocent family man seduced and trapped by a stereotypical psycho sexpot, but Shannen’s feral intensity makes it very different — she’s in a totally different movie from anyone else onscreen. It’s full of normal people living their hypocritical lives, all agreeing that she’s the problem. But she doesn’t see it that way and won’t play that role. It’s the Alanis “I’m not quite as well and I thought you should know” brought to life.

Doherty moved on to Charmed, in a threesome of witch sisters with Alyssa Milano and Holly Marie Combs. After three seasons of conflict with Milano, Charmed finally killed off Doherty’s character and replaced her with Rose McGowan. Doherty reprised the role of Brenda in the terrible 2008 Beverly Hills, 90210 reboot, and again in the campy 2019 BH90210 miniseries. She also had a great 2006 reality show on the Oxygen network: Breaking Up With Shannen Doherty. Each week she met with people desperate to escape their dysfunctional relationships, so she stepped in and did the breaking up for them. A perfect use of her skill set: the emotional assassin.

At the Charmed reunion panel last year, she kept snuggling on the couch with fellow bad-girl lifer Rose McGowan, who said her biggest career regret was that she and Shannen didn’t overlap on the show, so they never got to be witch sisters. A fan asked if Rose, Shannen, and Holly-Marie Combs would say the Power of Three ritual together, since they never got the chance on the show. It was indescribably moving to see these three women — all outcasts in Hollywood, all women discarded and demonized in different ways, all counted out and written off — huddle together and chant, “The Power of Three will set us free!”

It was a moment that said so much about her power, and why she will be missed and remembered. But she always lived up to that answer she gave Winona in Heathers. Why did she have to be Shannen Doherty? Because she could be.