SHANNEN DOHERTY

The rebellious actor died in July after a nine-year battle with cancer. Zara Wong looks back at the legacy of a woman who always lived on her own terms

Sprawled against two long-haired dogs, hair bouffant, eyebrows arched and with a cigarette dangling out of her lined lips, then 22-year-old Shannen Doherty is posing for Vanity Fair quite unlike most starlets. But then, she is not like most starlets. Called “difficult” and “volatile” by said publication, as well as “out of control” by Us Weekly, Doherty is the beautiful, beguiling bad girl of the ’90s – a role she played on and off screen.

Five years earlier, a part in the cult film Heathers, a dark teen comedy about a clique of popular mean girls all named Heather (which also starred Winona Ryder and Christian Slater), had simultaneously launched the teen actor to fame and earned her the reputation of a “complete and utter terror in every possible way”, according to director Michael Lehmann. The crew had wanted Doherty to dye her brunette hair blonde like the other Heathers, but she refused.

But in an interview with People magazine that same year, she said it was on that film set that she was called a “bitch” for the first time. She was only 16 years old during filming (and 17 when it was released), and had made it clear that she disapproved of a crew member’s affair with an extra. “It was the first time I actually saw somebody take advantage of the extras,” she said. “He knew I disliked him, and he was the first person to call me a bitch.”

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 12, 1971, to Rosa and Tom Doherty, Shannen grew up with an older brother, Sean. It was there in America’s Deep South that she was raised in her mother’s Southern Baptist faith. “I saw how women were treated, and I wasn’t going to be treated like that,” she said.