“I don’t want people to be crying – or people to privately be like, ‘Thank God that bitch is dead.’”
So declared Shannen Doherty, the noted actress, about her hypothetical funeral, in the months leading up to her death. She passed away over the weekend, following a nine-year battle with breast cancer, her publicist confirmed. She was 53 years old.
Doherty, born in Memphis, is perhaps best known for her leading-lady work on the small screen, most notably as Brenda Walsh on “Beverly Hills, 90210” and Prue Halliwell on “Charmed.” But she had been acting since childhood, even landing a small but recurring role on the well-known “Little House on the Prairie” series.
She’d go on to find more opportunities to shine from there, though: In the teen film “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun;” in family drama “Our House;” and in the hit dark comedy “Heathers;” before winding up in the halls of West Beverly Hills High School. Following her dual 1990s successes, Doherty remained active as an actress – though she never found the level of prominence she’d enjoyed in her heyday.
She long battled illness – a diagnosis of Crohn’s disease, an inflammation of the bowels, in 1999, followed by the cancer diagnosis in 2015. Breast cancer at first, before it spread to her lymph nodes. After aggressive treatment, the cancer went into remission in 2017; in 2020 however, it returned – a stage 4 diagnosis, which is terminal. And by 2023, it had spread to her brain. Despite a brief bit of hope earlier this year in the form of an experimental treatment, she succumbed to the illness.
But her health problems weren’t the cause of her lack of prominent roles. Rather, her inability to land another significant role, despite her undeniable charisma and talent, was largely due to her off-screen reputation – as People magazine summed it up, she was the “iconic Hollywood ‘bad girl’ of the nineties.”
The tabloids regularly churned out material that chronicled incidents of after-hours partying, tumultuous romantic relationships, and erratic on-set behavior, often involving behind-the-scenes fights with co-stars. Her departure from “Charmed” is even rumored to have happened because Alyssa Milano issued an ultimatum to producer Aaron Spelling.
Here’s the thing – in time, Doherty owned all of it.
Over the years, she gave numerous interviews copping to some less-than stellar behavior. “I have a rep. Did I earn it? Yeah, I did,” she told Parade magazine in 2010 as an example, while she was promoting her book, “Badass: A Hard-Earned Guide to Living Life with Style and (the Right) Attitude.”
Indeed, Doherty was candid about where she was “at,” as they say, for years. When the cancer reached her brain last year, she posted publicly about the experience of finding out. “My fear is obvious. I am extremely claustrophobic and there was a lot going on in my life,” she wrote on Instagram, while sharing a video of her undergoing a diagnostic imaging procedure that required her head to be pinned to the table, and her body covered in a lead blanket, for the duration.
And in her last months, she bore out her commitment to candor via her podcast, “Let’s Be Clear,” which she launched last November. Over the course of dozens of interviews, she contemplated her mortality, both in metaphorical and practical terms – in one installment, she discusses selling off her antique furniture, so that her mother wouldn’t be saddled with the task of doing so herself after Doherty died.
She also looked her past misdeeds in the face. Quite literally, as she hosted old flames and friends – and former co-stars, including Milano. “At this point in my life, with my health diagnosis … with fighting this horrific disease every day of my life, it is also incredibly important to me that the truth actually be told, as opposed to the narrative that others put out there for me,” she noted during another episode.
It’s a testament to one’s ability to grow, no matter how late – which is the legacy Doherty hoped to leave behind. Even as far back as that 2010 interview, Doherty was noting: “After a while, you sort of try to shed [a bad] 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.”
May it be so for her now – and for all of us, really.
