The death of Shannen Doherty at age 53 from breast cancer has Veronica Esposito reflecting on her acting career and lamenting that Doherty was the subject of so much hate over the years. Doherty played wholesome characters as a child actor before proving her true range in the black comedy Heathers. That, of course, led to her role as Brenda Walsh on TV's 90210, a character that everybody seemed to hate in the 1990s. (There was even a national "I Hate Brenda" newsletter.) The problem, writes Esposito, is that a lot of people seemed to conflate Doherty with Brenda.
"In retrospect it is easy to see that Doherty and Brenda Walsh became, to borrow a phrase from podcaster and writer Sarah Marshall, one of the maligned women of the 90s: a victim of sexism and misogyny who had reached dizzying heights of celebrity before she was even old enough to legally drink," writes Esposito. "Willingly or not, she became a repository of the public's emotions, at a time when young women reached for greater levels of personal and bodily autonomy."
The tabloid headlines of on-set friction, both on 90210 and later on Charmed, didn't help, nor did real-life controversies. Esposito lauds the "Let's Be Clear" podcast Doherty had been hosting over the past year to talk candidly about her tumultuous career as well as her cancer, as does Elena Bergeron in the New York Times, who writes: "Doherty faced the past and present head on, hosting former co-stars, directors, an ex-boyfriend and an ex-husband in conversations that sometimes exonerated her and that other times offered her the chance to assume culpability." (More Shannen Doherty stories.)
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