Shannen Doherty's Hollywood career included the ensemble casts of Heathers (1988), Beverly Hills 90210 (1990-1999), Mallrats (1995), and a lead role in Sleeping with the Devil (1997) pictured here. Photo / Getty Images
Shannen Doherty's Hollywood career included the ensemble casts of Heathers (1988), Beverly Hills 90210 (1990-1999), Mallrats (1995), and a lead role in Sleeping with the Devil (1997) pictured here. Photo / Getty Images
OPINION:
The late actress was the greatest TV villain of the 1990s – both on-screen and off. But what made her so good at being bad?
In the past, however, many of them may have held rather different opinions and memories about a woman who was nicknamed “the bad girl of Beverly Hills”. Fittingly, for someone whose 2010 memoir was entitled Badass: A Hard-Earned Guide to Living Life with Style and (the Right) Attitude, Doherty owned and embraced her reputation as one of TV’s great villains, but claimed that illness and maturity enabled her to correct the errors of her past and live with newfound serenity.
Many of those she worked with may have wished her well on this quest, especially after her 2015 diagnosis of breast cancer, but there was also no doubt that, in her heyday, Doherty resembled nothing so much as an old-school Hollywood diva in the Joan Crawford or Bette Davis mode. Her string of failed marriages and very public relationships was counterpointed by a gleeful series of scathing tabloid headlines about her behaviour, which was hindered – or helped, depending on whether you were a newspaper editor – by Doherty’s apparent refusal to express contrition for her antics. She was constantly late, she feuded with co-stars, she hogged the limelight, and blamed everyone around her when things went wrong. But did she apologise? Not really.
As she said in 2008: “I have nothing to apologise for. Whatever I did was my growing-up process that I needed to go through, that anybody my age goes through. And however other people may have reacted to that is their issue.”
Doherty began her career as a child star, appearing in the popular show Little House on the Prairie, but her first major film role came in 1988′s Heathers, in which she played Heather Duke, the nastiest and most powerful of the eponymous Heathers, who run an exclusive clique at an American high school. Even at the age of 17, Doherty had nascent diva tendencies. As Michael Lehmann, the director of Heathers, put it in a 2014 retrospective: “She had a television career, and she was a really talented actress, but a bit of a handful.”
Winona Ryder, Lisanne Falk, Kim Walker and Shannen Doherty in Heathers, 1989.
The film’s screenwriter Daniel Waters, meanwhile, tactfully called her “very ambitious”. Carrie Lynn, who played the unpleasantly named Martha Dumptruck, had less polite things to say about her former co-star. “The only one in the cast who stuck out like a sore thumb was Shannen. It’s like when you get a paper cut, and someone just purposely squeezes a lemon on it. She was the lemon. She was just so bitchy.”
Ironically, for someone who came from a conservative, cloistered background – she refused to say many of the film’s more creatively obscene epithets on the grounds that “I was a very sheltered 17-year-old. My mom was on set with me. I definitely had moments where I was blushing through my makeup” – her casting proved a lifeline for her career.
While her co-star Winona Ryder called her “a sweet girl [who] didn’t want to swear”, one of the other Heathers, Lisanne Falk had little time for Doherty. “Shannen didn’t have much of a sense of humour and she took herself a little seriously,” said the former child model.
“What’s funny is, watching [the film], I do think she did a really good job… I do remember [her] just kind of going, like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ She didn’t realise it was a comedy, or maybe know what a dark comedy meant.”
It is an inadvertently hilarious idea that one of the leads of a deeply subversive black comedy failed to realise that she wasn’t making a realistic account of life in high school – shades, perhaps, of Slim Pickens in Dr Strangelove, who always believed he was making a serious war picture rather than Kubrick’s farce – but Doherty emerged from the picture with credit.
“I don’t think [Shannen] at the time quite got what Heathers was, and that actually worked for us,” said producer Denise De Novi. “She made that character real.” She was then offered the role that would define her career, that of Brenda Walsh in super-producer Aaron Spelling’s series Beverly Hills 90210; ironically the network had to choose between that show or a TV version of Heathers, and Waters sardonically noted “Doherty wins in the end after all!”
Jason Priestley as Brandon Walsh, Shannen Doherty as Brenda Walsh, Tori Spelling as Donna Martin, Luke Perry as Dylan McKay, Jennie Garth as Kelly Taylor, Gabrielle Carteris as Andrea Zuckerman, Brian Austin Green as David Silver, Ian Ziering as Steve Sanders in Beverly Hills 90210.
The character of Brenda began in the series as a naïve good girl who was struggling to fit into the new environment that she was placed in. By the time that Doherty left the show – or was fired – in 1994, she had metamorphosed into a more complex and multi-faceted creation, although many chose to regard her simply as a Machiavellian figure. When Entertainment Weekly included Brenda in their list of “21 Top TV Bitches”, they wrote “As Doherty reportedly became more and more difficult to deal with behind the scenes, the show’s writers made her character nastier and nastier. But hey, every good soap needs a delectable villainess, right?”
During this period, Doherty’s behind-the-scenes clashes with cast and crew became the stuff of infamy. There was even a newsletter published by a fan of the show, I Hate Brenda, which muddied the waters between Doherty’s on- and off-screen behaviour and resulted in both Brenda and the actress portraying her becoming national hate figures. Yet Doherty did not help herself. One of her most scandalous, and salaciously reported, antics involved the seduction of the temporarily estranged husband of her former Little House on the Prairie co-star Melissa Gilbert. According to Gilbert’s memoir, when confronted about the tryst, Doherty coolly replied: “I told you that when I grew up I wanted to be just like you.”
Her own marital life was a complex and eventful one. She was briefly engaged to Max Factor heir Dean Jay Factor, but he ended up ending the engagement and filing for a restraining order, citing Doherty’s threats towards him. In a court deposition filed in May 1993, Factor wrote “I was weary of the verbal assaults and locked myself in our bathroom. At this point, she threatened to shoot me and said, ‘I’m going to drop you!’ I knew she had a loaded 9mm automatic…. I heard the chamber pulled back; at that point, I hastily exited the house through a back door connected to the bathroom and escaped.”
Her attitude to settling arguments was creative. Factor recalled that “she threatened to hire a few guys to beat me up and to sodomise me on the front lawn.” Doherty dealt with the potential embarrassment with aplomb, declaring in a TV interview “Don’t believe everything you read. To paraphrase Mark Twain, half the things you read about me are untrue, and the others are lies.”
When she became engaged to the actor and singer Ashley Hamilton after having known him for a fortnight, the show’s crew held bets on whether the marriage would last longer than 10 weeks. In the event, it went on for five months, and Doherty subsequently called it “really horrible”. Whether because of her unhappiness at home or through an imperious attitude towards work, she was often late or absent on set. “She had habitual lateness,” executive producer Charles Rosin said in 2000. “Her lateness was appalling, and she had a callous attitude and an indifference. She was clearly not very happy on this show anymore.”
Many of her co-stars had had her measure from after the end of the first series. When she had been doing promotional responsibilities with Jason Priestley, and had not been given sufficiently grandiose transportation, she yelled at the PR: “Really? A town car? You send a town car to take me to the airport, not a limo?” Writing in his memoir, Priestley remembered trying to make a joke out of the situation. She turned on him, and snapped: “Stop talking. Just sit here for the rest of the flight and be quiet.”
When Doherty left Beverley Hills 90210 in 1994, Spelling had this to say about her departure: “Shannen thought it was time for her to go…the cast did, too.” (Her posing for Playboy twice, in 1993 and 1994, did not help her with the famously conservative producer.) Doherty then attempted to branch out into a mainstream film career by appearing in the lead in Kevin Smith’s second film Mallrats. The picture, which was supposed to combine the credibility Smith had acquired from his debut Clerks with a studio budget, was intended to be the next Animal House. Instead, it bombed.
Shannen Doherty as Brenda Walsh in Beverly Hills 90210.
Early this year, Doherty half-jokingly confronted Smith about this on her podcast Let’s Be Clear. “That’s kind of the interesting thing about Mallrats, right, is that it wasn’t a box office success,” she said.
“People literally thought that I was carrying the movie so therefore it was a box office failure it was completely on me. So there was no film career after that, which was a little brutal.”
That Mallrats was a poor film did not help, but by now Doherty was one of the most toxic bad girls in Hollywood. After her arrest in 1997 for smashing a beer bottle on a stranger’s car window outside a West Hollywood bar, she was sentenced to probation and anger management counselling; a humiliating downfall for someone who, a few years before, seemed to have the industry in the palm of her hand. Yet she soon managed a comeback, appearing in the fantasy drama Charmed (again produced by Spelling, who had, apparently, forgiven her trespasses) and now candidly declaring in interviews that “There’s no other word for it… I was an a**hole.”
This contrition did not last, and she soon departed the show – once again at Spelling’s behest – amidst reports of tension with her co-star Alyssa Milano, who Doherty was rumoured to be jealous of. Milano later commented that “we definitely didn’t get along. Shannen and I are very different people, and I think it’s almost like a roommate. If you spend that much time with someone and there are differences anyway, you’re not always going to get along.”
Alyssa Milano, Shannen Doherty and Holly Marie Combs in Charmed., 1999. Photo / Getty Images
There was another short-lived and unsuccessful marriage to Rick Salomon, which was annulled in 2003, and Doherty, no longer the ingenue, increasingly took on work which parodied her off-set reputation, appearing in nonsensical made-for-TV films entitled things like Sleeping with the Devil and Satan’s School for Girls.
A 2006 reality TV show called Breaking Up With Shannen Doherty at least indicated that she was in on the joke, but it received negative reviews and was cancelled after one series. Yet by 2010, she was able to rebuild her career. “I have a rep,” she admitted. “Did I earn it? Yeah, I did. 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.”
Certainly, the affection with which she has been remembered by many seems genuine, and the courage with which she dealt with her illness in her final years was both matter-of-fact and inspirational. Yet she will always be remembered as “the bitch of Beverly Hills” and it’s hard not to believe that, on some level, Doherty would have been fine with that.
