The Emotional Intensity of Shannen Doherty—and Brenda Walsh—Won’t Be Forgotten

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The character of Brenda Walsh, played by Shannen Doherty on Beverly Hills 90210, can be summed up in a 30-second clip that came during season four. The group of teens we dutifully followed through high school were now students at fictional California University and there was an earnest three-episode arc about the theater department’s competitive production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Aspiring actress Brenda had landed the leading role of Maggie via dubious measures and her jealous, off-kilter understudy, Laura, tried to sabotage her by placing a fake phone call saying rehearsal was moved to a different time.

When Brenda figures out what happened after missing her call time, the scene she delivers to Laura and Steve Sanders, Laura’s boyfriend who is also Brenda’s brother’s best friend, is bone-chilling. She quietly and calmly eviscerates them both, her voice dripping with ice, her body language confident, her intense green eyes flaming. “I always knew you were weak,” she says to Steve, not letting it go as they turn to leave. “One more thing, Laura,” she spits. “I may have missed rehearsal, but I’m still Maggie. And you still have nothing…well, except for Steve, which is kind of the same thing I guess now, isn’t it?”

Watching those words back 30 years later, I’m still struck. Doherty’s delivery is cutting as hell. It’s committed, it’s confident, it’s a scene during which a female character stands up for herself and isn’t afraid of not being liked or offending anyone, including one of her oldest friends. It is the absolute essence of Brenda Walsh.

When viewers were introduced to the character of Brenda when the seminal teen soap aired on Fox in the fall of 1990, we didn’t know what we were in for. On paper, the role was fairly cliché—a wholesome Minnesota teen moves with her twin brother and parents to excess-filled Beverly Hills, California, to attend high school. But from the second she appeared on televisions across the country, it was obvious Doherty, who passed away Saturday, July 13, after a long battle with cancer, was determined to buck any built-in tropes that inevitably came with being on a prime-time teen soap. In every scene she was in, she played Brenda with the gale force of a midwestern winter and took what could have been a generic fish-out-of-water character to transcendent heights, seamlessly going from moon-face cutie in stretch headbands to sculpted beauty who didn’t take shit from anybody.

Because 90210 was a show targeted to teenagers, it over-indexed on Very Important Issues. In season one alone we got storylines about shoplifting, affirmative action, breast cancer, date rape, drunk driving, peer pressure, absentee parents, learning disabilities, the plight of the undocumented shift worker, AIDS, underage drinking, shady athletic recruitment practices within the LA school system, diet pills, and teen moms. And yet no matter what clichéd material she was given, Doherty imbued her character’s problems with palpable emotional depth and a pursed-lipped intensity that was commonly written off as bitchiness.

Watching the show back—which I’ve done many (many) times over the years—I’ve come to see that it’s kind of impossible to extricate Brenda’s prickliness from Doherty’s real-life persona. Throughout the ’90s, the actress was a prime target for tabloid fodder thanks to her brand of badass: hard partying, rumored hotheadedness on set, domestic disputes, court-mandated anger management counseling. Paparazzi images of the actor—oversized jackets, signature brown bangs, almost ghoul-like pallor—live rent-free in my head. In my younger world, the big news of the day was always about reports that the star of my favorite show hated her castmates, didn’t show up to set, was generally a difficult woman to work with.

By the end of 1993, rumors swirled that creator Aaron Spelling had enough and that Doherty was being let go after season four, despite being the undisputed star. Some fans say the series—which ran for six more seasons—never recovered post the Brenda years.

Beverly Hills, 90210 is a classic piece of nostalgia for dozens of reasons—among them the novel advent of creating new summer episodes for us to watch in real time starting in season two, the ensemble cast becoming global phenomenons, the fashion, the iconic catchphrases that, to this day, can be volleyed from one fan to the next and need no explanation (“I’d like to exchange an egg” comes to mind.) But the force that drove the first half of the series and catapulted it to must-see TV was the central, for-the-ages love affair between Brenda Walsh and bad boy Dylan McKay, played by Luke Perry who passed away from a stroke in 2019 at the age of 52.

From the first time the two characters met in an early Season 1 episode—Dylan sliding out from under the car he was fixing up to appreciatively size up Brenda’s legs standing above him in shorts and slouch socks—their chemistry was unmistakable. The passionate relationship was high-stakes—her overprotective father forbid it, Brenda defied him, the cycle continued—but it was more than a typical star-crossed teen romance.

Perry matched Doherty’s soulful intensity, finding in Brenda a salve for his lost boyhood, his lack of family, his eight-million dollar trust fund but nobody to love. When he fools around with her best friend Kelly Taylor during a lonely summer at the start of the third season, a nation gasped. The writers had to do it—what’s a soap without cheating?—but even as Dylan settles into a fairly insipid relationship with Kelly, it’s clear Brenda is his twin flame. So for a diehard fan of the show, the fact that the only two characters that have passed away are Brenda and Dylan hits especially hard.

When it was announced in 2019 that Beverly Hills, 90210 was being rebooted with most of its original cast who would be playing heightened versions of themselves, my emails to Shannen Doherty’s publicist began. They started out bland and professional (“would Shannen consider doing a feature with Glamour?”) But over time they bordered on desperate (“Me again! touching base one last time to remind you that Glamour is very interested in an in-depth profile of Shannen and I’d 100 percent be willing to travel to her!”) That’s because, for most of my adult life as a writer and editor, Doherty was high on my short list of dream subjects to interview. I believed she would be forthcoming and honest and, frankly, very witty. In 2010, she leaned into her reputation and wrote a self-help book called Badass: A Hard-Earned Guide to Living Life with Style and (the Right) Attitude, which is described as a resource for women “who are fed up with coming in second and being treated like a doormat, or who just want more out of life.” That’s funny!

Her team was marginally interested but ultimately the interview never happened. I wish it had, but I’m grateful that the 53-year-old addressed all the things I’d have asked her on Let’s Be Clear with Shannen Doherty—a podcast she started in 2023 as a means to save her from feeling depressed amid her stage IV cancer journey. “It fuels me,” she told People a month after the show debuted.

For lifelong fans of Doherty and 90210, the podcast was a revelation. She not only talked openly and emotionally about her declining health, but also her tempestuous career and public image. A parade of former costars served as guests, and recounted their version of events that happened three decades ago and dominated the tabloids. Doherty was frank about how getting fired from Charmed—the supernatural WB series she booked following 90210—was especially painful because it further cemented her status as a “difficult” woman.

When she was let go from Beverly Hills in 1994, it was reported that her costar Tori Spelling—the daughter of the show’s creator and a onetime close friend of Doherty’s—had requested the ousting. In April, Spelling appeared on two episodes of “Let’s Be Clear,” and the pair rehashed it all. Her onscreen brother, Jason Priestley, also appeared.

Whether this was a form of tying up loose ends before her death, or way to a publicly clear up some of the muck that’s surrounded her persona over the years, Doherty’s podcast is a moving bookend for fans who regularly watch and marvel at her early work, whether as Jenny Wilder on Little House on the Prairie, Heather Duke in formative ’80s bitchfest Heathers, Prue Halliwell in Charmed, or—most crucially—her go-for-broke breakthrough performance in Beverly Hills, 90210. Brenda forever.

Originally Appeared on Glamour

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