Shannen Doherty, ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’ actress, dead at 53
Shannen Doherty has died at the age of 53.
The “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Charmed” actress passed away Saturday after a years-long battle with breast cancer.
“It is with a heavy heart that I confirm the passing of actress Shannen Doherty,” her publicist, Leslie Sloane, said in a statement to PEOPLE on Sunday.
“On Saturday, July 13, she lost her battle with cancer after many years of fighting the disease,” Sloane continued. “The devoted daughter, sister, aunt and friend was surrounded by her loved ones as well as her dog, Bowie. The family asks for their privacy at this time so they can grieve in peace.”
Doherty was initially diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, enduring a mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation.
“When I dropped down to 92 pounds from chemo and was incredibly dehydrated, I had to still get out of bed,” she reflected on her health battle on her podcast in December 2023.
“My husband at the time [Kurt Iswarienko was] sort of begging me to keep going, and my mom [was] literally trying to pick me up out of bed and get me to the doctor. … At that point in time, I thought that I wouldn’t survive it.”
She announced she was in remission in 2017, but in February 2020, shared she was battling Stage 4 breast cancer.
Doherty told fans she was “fighting to stay alive” during a virtual appearance on “Good Morning America” in October 2021.
“I never want to operate [like I’m dying],” she explained.
In November 2023, Doherty revealed her Stage 4 breast cancer had spread to her bones after having previously spread to her brain.
“I don’t want to die,” she heartbreakingly told People at the time.
“I’m not done with living. I’m not done with loving. I’m not done with creating. I’m not done with hopefully changing things for the better,” Doherty continued. “I’m just not — I’m not done.”
A month later, Doherty revealed that she learned her ex-husband, Iswarienko, had been allegedly cheating on her for two years just hours before undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumor, which she named Bob.
“Bob had to get removed and dissected to see his pathology and then i had to do some more brain radiation,” she told the magazine in November 2023. “It’s been a journey. Definitely one of the scariest things I’ve ever been through in my entire life.”
Doherty was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 12, 1971.
She started acting on TV in the early 1980s with credits on “Father Murphy” and “Voyagers!” before landing a star turn as Jenny Wilder on “Little House on the Prairie.”
Her career gained steam with the 1988 black comedy “Heathers.” She played Heather Duke, who sits pretty in Westerburg High School’s most powerful clique.
She landed her breakout role, a four-season gig on FOX’s “Beverly Hills, 90210,” shortly thereafter.
She played Brenda Walsh, a brunette teen thespian trying to find her place in blonde Beverly Hills after moving from Minnesota with her twin brother, Brandon, and their parents, Jim and Cindy.
Brenda was sent to London indefinitely at the end of her freshman year in college.
Co-star Tori Spelling revealed in 2015 that she played a big part in Doherty getting fired from the show in 1994.
Spelling claimed that she went to her dad, Aaron Spelling, who co-created and executive produced the series, to tell him that Doherty and co-star Jennie Garth weren’t getting along to the point they almost had a physical fight.
“I felt like I was a part of something… a movement… that cost someone their livelihood,” Spelling explained on “Celebrity Lie Detector.” “Was she a horrible person? No — she was one of the best friends I ever had.”
Doherty would later admit that despite the money and fame, she was unhappy during filming.
In 2000, Doherty told Entertainment Weekly that it seemed like “too large” of a “sacrifice” at the time.
“The sacrifice of a camera pointed in my face 24 hours a day while I was desperately trying to grow up, to figure out my spirituality, to figure out my boyfriends. I mean, I was a teenager,” she recalled.
Doherty starred in the cult classic “Mallrats” (1995) following her “90210” departure.
She later portrayed Prue Halliwell — the eldest Halliwell witch sister, who could move objects with her mind — on Aaron Spelling’s “Charmed,” from 1998 until 2001. She was killed off amid on-set tension with co-star Alyssa Milano.
People magazine once referred to Doherty as the “iconic Hollywood ‘bad girl’ of the nineties.”
“I have a rep. Did I earn it? Yeah, I did,” she admitted to Parade in 2010.
“But, after a while you sort of try to shed that rep because you’re kind of a different person. You’ve evolved and all of the bad things you’ve done in your life have brought you to a much better place.”
With Garth and Tori Spelling, Doherty appeared in the 2008 “90210” reboot and the 2019 parody “BH90210.”
She competed on Season 10 of “Dancing With the Stars,” getting eliminated first with pro partner Mark Ballas in 2010.
Doherty and her then-fiancé Iswarienko documented the road to their 2011 wedding in the WE TV reality show “Shannen Says,” which aired in 2012.
And in later years, Doherty shifted her focus from teen dramas to TV movies, starring in “All I Want for Christmas” (2014), “No One Would Tell” (2018), and “List of a Lifetime” (2021).
Offscreen, she appeared nude in Playboy in December 1993 and was photographed for spreads in the magazine in March 1994 and December 2003.
A noted animal rights activist, much like Brenda Walsh, Doherty spoke on Capitol Hill in 2017 about stopping the trade of dog and cat meat for human consumption.
“Having cancer brings things into a different kind of focus,” she said, crediting her own dog with helping her recover from her 2015 surgery and treatment.
“We as Americans have trained dogs to do amazing things — they take bullets for our officers and sniff bombs. They are part of us and for us to not stand up and protect animals … we have to protect our own,” she added.
Other challenges awaited her. In 2018, Doherty lost her Malibu home in Southern California’s Woolsey Fire.
“This place. I got married there. But before that, it’s the place @chriscortazzo let me stay in after my dad passed away,” she captioned a picture of her wedding day.
Doherty continued: “It’s the place I felt my dad with me. It’s gone. Fire has taken it away. I’m devastated by all that’s happening. My heart is ripped apart.”
She was married three times: to Ashley Hamilton, the son of actor George Hamilton, from October 1993 to April 1994, to Rick Salomon for nine months in 2002, and to Iswarienko from October 2011 until April 2023.
Learning Iswarienko was unfaithful to her for two years while Doherty was fighting cancer made a tough battle even harder.
“At the end of the day, I just felt so incredibly unloved by someone I was with for 14 years, by someone I loved with all my heart,” she said of the heartbreaking revelation on her podcast “Let’s Be Clear With Shannen Doherty.”
“Just to have to go through [health crises] while trying to figure out if you’re going to get a f—king divorce and trying to get to the truth of that.”
Doherty’s death follows other “90210” actor passings in recent years. Her on-screen love interest, Dylan McKay, was played by Luke Perry, who died in 2019. Jed Allan (Steve Sanders’ father, Rush) died the same year.
Denise Dowse (high school guidance counselor Mrs. Yvonne Teasley) and Joe E. Tata (Peach Pit owner Nat Bussichio) passed away in 2022.
In January, David Gail — who played her “90210” fiance — died from complications from sudden cardiac arrest at age 58.
That same month, Doherty revealed on her “Let’s Be Clear” podcast that she wanted her remains “to be mixed with my dog and I want it to be mixed with my dad. I do not want to be buried and not cremated.”
She also blatantly explained that there are “a lot of people” that she doesn’t want to attend her funeral.
“There’s a lot of people that I think would show up that I don’t want there,” Doherty told her guest, her best friend and the executor of her will, Chris Cortazzo, although she didn’t name any names.
“I don’t want them there because their reasons for showing up aren’t necessarily the best reasons,” she explained. “Like, they don’t really like me — and they have their reasons, and good for them — but they don’t actually really like me enough to show up to my funeral.
“But they will,” Doherty claimed, “because it’s the politically correct thing to do, and they don’t want to look bad.”
