Troubled actor dubbed ‘the Hollywood bad girl of the 90s’
Child stardom has a habit of leading to a troubled adulthood, and so it was for Shannen Doherty.
Child stardom has a habit of leading to a troubled adulthood, and so it was for Shannen Doherty.
A picture of cuteness in pigtails and pinafore, at 11 she was starring in the TV series Little House on the Prairie, based on the books about 19th-century life in the American Midwest by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
By 14 she was appearing alongside Helen Hunt and Sarah Jessica Parker in the 1985 adolescent comedy Girls Just Want to Have Fun.
Before she was out of her teens she had starred in Heathers, a much darker film about teenage sex and suicide starring Winona Ryder, and was cast in long-running hit TV teen drama series Beverly Hills, 90210.
By then her problems had become gossip-column fodder. While making Heathers she fell out with her co-stars and argued on set with the director Michael Lehmann, who euphemistically called her “a bit of a handful”.
There were more bust-ups on Beverly Hills, 90210. Her four years on the show were dominated by tabloid headlines about her fights and feuds, particularly with co-star Jennie Garth who said the animosity escalated into physical violence in which they “wanted to claw each other’s eyes out”.
As a result Doherty was effectively sacked and in the final series she was edited out of an hour-long retrospective episode that featured old footage of every other actor in the show’s history.
Her talent was unquestionable and Aaron Spelling – the Beverly Hills, 90210 producer who sacked her – called her “the best young actress I’ve seen in a long time”.
Four years later he tried again and cast her as a witch in the TV series Charmed. She lasted three years before Spelling sacked her once more in 2001 – this time for fighting with her co-star Alyssa Milano.
Her reputation for making trouble followed her everywhere she went. After she took the lead role in the 1992 TV movie Obsessed and persistently clashed with cast and crew, the film’s producer Peter Duchow was asked if he would work with her again. “How much are you going to pay me?” he replied. “Like a lot of talented people, she has mood swings. Hers are perhaps a lot more exaggerated than others.”
When she failed to turn up for the first day of shooting for Jailbreakers (1994) the movie’s director, William Friedkin, fired her and auditioned a dozen actors to take her place. None of them convinced and he was forced to turn back to Doherty.
She appeared unrepentant. “People think I’m a bitch and I’m not saying I don’t have my moments of bitchiness,” she admitted. “But it’s never for no reason. I’ve always been a ballsy kid and I know it pisses some people off.”
By the time she had been rusticated from Beverly Hills, 90210 she had made the first of three nude appearances in Playboy and was subsequently paid a reported $US1 million to strip off for the cover of the magazine in 2003.
“I would rather live my life to the fullest than constantly conduct myself in a certain way to gain approval from others,” she said in the accompanying interview. “I’ve always been outspoken, and there’s something to be said for having the courage to just live your life. I have regrets but no apologies.”
People magazine called her the “iconic Hollywood ‘bad girl’ of the Nineties”. “I tried drugs and drinking,” she later confessed. “I was drinking up a storm. Every single night I was out clubbing. It was a bad scene.”
There was a drink-driving charge for which she was given five days’ community service and three years’ probation. There was also a court referral for anger-management counselling after she got into an argument with a motorist and smashed a beer bottle on his car window as he tried to drive away. While she was in Beverly Hills, 90210 her bank froze her accounts when she bounced $US32,000 worth of bad cheques.
“I was very confused back then about what I wanted for myself, and the attention was way too much,” she said. “I didn’t always handle it that well.”
When it came to men there were a series of bad relationships and two failed marriages. She left home at 18 to move in with a 31-year-old boyfriend who was a drug dealer, but left him six months later when he struck her. She was briefly engaged to the Max Factor heir Dean Factor before he filed for a restraining order against her, alleging physical violence and abuse.
An engagement to Chris Foufas, a real estate manager, was broken off after a few months. Another engagement, to the actor Judd Nelson, whom she met on the set of the 1994 erotic thriller Blindfold: Acts of Obsession, was similarly short-lived.
By then she had already divorced her first husband, Ashley Hamilton, son of the actor George Hamilton, after a marriage that lasted barely a year. Her second marriage, in 2002 to the professional poker player Rick Salomon, was similarly short. After their divorce in 2003, Salomon made a notorious sex tape with Paris Hilton.
She eventually found happiness with celebrity photographer Kurt Iswarienko, whom she met at a party in 2008 and married three years later. By then she claimed to have become a reformed character and set out her determination to leave behind the misadventures of her past in a 2010 memoir, Badass: A Hard-Earned Guide to Living Life with Style and (the Right) Attitude.
“Maybe my career would have taken a different direction if I’d been wiser and older, but I wasn’t,” she said. “I started young and I got 90210 kind of success very early, and it came at a time in my life where I was a petrified kid.”
In any case, she reasoned, she hadn’t really been that bad. “At least I never did a sex tape and I never didn’t wear panties and flash a camera,” she noted.
Shannen Maria Doherty was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1971, the second child of Rosa (nee Wright), a beauty parlour owner, and Tom Doherty, an entrepreneurial businessman.
When she was seven the family moved to Los Angeles, where her father had bought a trucking firm.
Within a few years the business collapsed. “Shannen saw both sides of the coin,” her father said. “We lived in a prestigious area, with an ocean view. Then we had the rug pulled out from under us. There was a time when the doorbell would ring and it might be the utility man there to cut off the power.”
When she was nine she tagged along when her brother, Sean, auditioned for a church production and found herself cast as one of the seven dwarfs in Snow White. She had found her metier and “hammed it up” to get attention. By the age of 10 she was appearing in a Pepsi commercial.
In later years, after she had straightened herself out, she expressed her gratitude for “being given a second chance” in her acting career. Yet in truth, it was a case of second best after her early promise. There were reality TV shows and an appearance as a celebrity contestant on Dancing with the Stars. Her attempt at a career revival was halted in 2015 by breast cancer, which resulted in a single mastectomy.
In 2017 she announced she was in remission and was well enough to join the cast of a television series based on her 1988 film Heathers, but by 2020 the cancer had returned and spread throughout her body.
“You can either be a bad girl in life, or you can become a badass, which means owning who you are and being compassionate and knowing when you’ve made a mistake and not repeating it,” she explained.
“I had this amazing career in front of me and because of some things I did, my career really suffered. But, after a while you try to shed that rep because you’ve evolved and all of the bad things you’ve done in your life have brought you to a much better place.”
Shannen Doherty, actor, was born on April 12, 1971. She died from cancer on July 13, 2024, aged 53
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