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 go.
