Shannen Doherty, a child actor who rose to prominence in the 1990s as a star on the high school drama “Beverly Hills, 90210,” passed away on Saturday after a prolonged battle with breast cancer.

“It is with a heavy heart that I confirm the passing of actress Shannen Doherty. On Saturday, July 13, she lost her battle with cancer after many years of fighting the disease,” said Doherty’s publicist, Leslie Sloane. She was 53 years old.

Doherty was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, and although she went into remission two years later, this reprieve was short-lived. In February 2020, court documents in a lawsuit Doherty filed against her insurance company over damage to her home revealed that she was “dying” of Stage 4 breast cancer, which had metastasized and become incurable.

“It’s a bitter pill to swallow in a lot of ways,” Doherty said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” at the time. “There are definitely days where I say, ‘Why me?’ And then I go, ‘Well, why not me? Who else besides me deserves this?’ None of us do.”

In June 2023, Doherty shared an emotional post on Instagram revealing that her cancer had spread to her brain at the beginning of the year. “On January 5th, my scan showed Mets in my brain,” Doherty captioned a video of her receiving radiation therapy. “My fear is obvious. I am extremely claustrophobic and there was a lot going on in my life,” she added. “But that fear…. The turmoil….. the timing of it all…. This is what cancer can look like.”

Born on April 12, 1971, in Memphis, Tennessee, to a mother who owned a beauty salon and a father who worked in a bank, Doherty did not take long to get to Hollywood. By the time she was 10, she made her acting debut on the short-lived series “Father Murphy,” just three years after her family moved to Los Angeles.

Series producer Michael Landon noticed the fledgling actor and cast her on his hit show “Little House on the Prairie” the following year as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s adopted daughter for an 18-episode run. This exposure led to a succession of roles, including a three-year turn (1986-88) on the Wilford Brimley family drama “Our House” as one of the leads and a starring role in the 1989 high school dark comedy “Heathers.”

Her biggest break, however, came with the arrival of “Beverly Hills, 90210” in 1990. Doherty, then 19, became a superstar playing the straitlaced but short-tempered Brenda Walsh. The show became a guilty pleasure for a generation, but things did not always go according to script for Doherty. She developed a reputation for being difficult to work with on the set, purportedly feuding with cast and crew members, especially co-star Jennie Garth. The headlines in celebrity magazines and entertainment news shows made her as infamous as she was famous.

“She became a metaphorical reality-TV star before there were actual reality-TV stars,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “It was as if the real Shannen Doherty, and you can put six sets of quotation marks around the word ‘real,’ had two shows playing in parallel.”

Doherty left the show after its fourth season, while most of the show’s other leads, including Garth, continued for another six seasons. Reflecting on her departure, Doherty told Entertainment Weekly in 2008, “The best thing that ever could have happened to me was I got off ‘90210’ when I did. It let me find a little bit of peace and discover who I was as a person. Not the person who the press made me out to be because I’d had a few bad experiences in my personal life, and I was struggling to figure out a bad husband or a bad boyfriend, and I was doing it under the spotlight, so I wasn’t reacting well to any of it. I really wasn’t. And I know that.”

Her co-star Jason Priestley expressed sadness at the news of her death, saying she was "a force of nature and I will miss her."

Doherty’s career continued with roles in various films and television shows. Notably, she reunited with “90210” producer Aaron Spelling for the supernatural soap opera “Charmed,” where she played a witch alongside Alyssa Milano and Holly Marie Combs. Her performance rekindled the magic she enjoyed earlier in her career, at least for the three seasons she stayed on before leaving the show. She directed three of the final episodes in which she appeared. Following news of her death, Milano issued a statement acknowledging their complicated relationship but expressing deep respect and admiration for Doherty.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Doherty appeared in several short-lived television series before moving into reality television in 2006 with “Breaking Up With Shannen Doherty,” where she helped participants end their toxic relationships. This subject seemed familiar to Doherty, who had experienced two divorces: her marriage to Ashley Hamilton in 1993 ended in divorce in 1994, and her marriage to Rick Salomon ended in a 2002 annulment nine months after their wedding. In April 2023, Doherty filed for divorce from her third husband, photographer Kurt Iswarienko, whom she married in 2011.

By friends’ accounts, Doherty mellowed in middle age. She reprised her role as Brenda Walsh twice: for an extended guest-starring turn on the 2008 reboot “90210” and in a 2019 dramedy, “BH90210,” where the original cast returned to play fictional versions of themselves attempting to revisit their hit show. “It was not only that she was never able to escape the gravitational pull of that role, but that she kept going back to it of her own free will,” Thompson said.

Shannen Doherty’s death marks the second major loss for the “Beverly Hills, 90210” cast, following Luke Perry’s death in March 2019 due to complications from a stroke.