Beloved ‘90210’ star Shannen Doherty dies after decade-long battle with breast cancer
Beloved “90210” star Shannen Doherty has passed away.
After a nearly decade-long battle with breast cancer, multiple reports have confirmed news of Doherty’s passing. She was just 53 years old.
In a statement shared with People, her longtime publicist Leslie Sloane revealed, “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.”
“The devoted daughter, sister, aunt and friend was surrounded by her loved ones as well as her dog, Bowie. The family asks for their privacy at this time so they can grieve in peace.”
Just a few months ago in April, Doherty explained on her podcast “Let’s Be Clear” how she was preparing for her death. She explained that she was focusing on preparing for her passing for the sake of her family.
During the episode, Doherty insisted that she still believed in living life to the fullest but added that her long battle with breast cancer “has really made me take stock of my life and shift my priorities.”
Those priorities included her beloved mom. “My priority at the moment is my mom and about making things…I know it’s going to be hard on her if I pass away before her, but so sorry,” Doherty said as she started to get emotional.
“This is a hard one for me.”
“I was giving up on this dream of you know, building this property out and putting a house for me and a house for my mom, and then extending the barn and rescuing horses and having a sanctuary,” she continued, at the time.
But while this moment was emotional, Doherty said she wasn’t “giving up on life” or “throwing in the towel,” and had a “sense of peace and a sense of calm.” And that’s because you’re “helping the people that you leave behind just have a cleaner, easier transition.”
And in the end, Doherty realized that she didn’t need all of the things she was holding on to and that there were other ways of still making her dreams of helping animals a reality. “Maybe it’s more about ease for myself,” she concluded.
“I think it’s easy for myself. It’s again that peace of mind. It’s the looking at what you’ve accumulated over a lifetime,” Doherty explained, adding that ridding herself of some of this stuff also gave her the ability to shift her priorities again and start making new last memories elsewhere.
“So as I was so sad about giving something up. I’m also now reminded of the freedom giving that up has given me to then provide memories not only for myself, not only treasured moments for myself, but for the people that I love.”
In January, Doherty told her supporters that she had witnessed a miracle.
During an episode of her podcast, Doherty revealed that after months of her cancer treatments not showing any progress, miraculously, six or seven treatment later, the treatment was working.
“I’m on a new cancer infusion ... after the sixth, seventh treatment, we really saw it breaking down the blood brain barrier,” Doherty explained. “So I call that a miracle? Yeah. For me that happens to be a miracle.”
Doherty had been undergoing intense radiation treatments that admittedly scared her because of the potential side effects. “I was petrified of, you know, is it going to change who I am?”
The actress was first diagnosed with cancer in 2015. Eight years later, Doherty shared a video of herself crying while undergoing radiation.
She revealed that she was told the cancer had spread to her brain on January 5, 2023. “My CT scan showed Mets in my brain,” Doherty wrote. “...January 12, the first round of radiation took place. My fear is obvious.”
Doherty continued writing, “I am extremely claustrophobic, and there was a lot going on in my life. I am fortunate as I have great doctors like Dr. Amin Mirahdi and the amazing techs at Cedar Sinai. But that fear…. The turmoil….. the timing of it all…. This is what cancer can look like.”
The emotional video showed tears streaming down her face as she received her first round of radiation. The actress had also seemingly alluded to her decision to divorce her husband of 11 years.
Doherty confirmed in April that she had filed for divorce from Kurt Iswarienko. “Divorce is the last thing Shannen wanted,” Sloane told People in an exclusive statement.
“Unfortunately, she felt she was left with no other option.”
After Doherty was first diagnosed in 2015 with breast cancer after finding a lump in her own breast, she began her fight against breast cancer with hormone therapy.
However, she eventually needed to undergo a single mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation. Two years after her initial diagnosis, in 2017, Self reports that Doherty announced she was finally in remission.
Sadly in 2020, the actress announced that the cancer had returned. This time it was stage IV metastatic breast cancer, and it had spread to other parts of her body, like her spine.
Doherty admitted she learned the cancer returned after experiencing sharp pain in her back. “It was no longer, ‘I worked out, and I’m a little sore.’ It was like, ‘God, this hurts,’” Elle reported.
“I don’t think that I’ve processed it,” she told Good Morning America at the time. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow in a lot of ways. I definitely have days where I say, ‘Why me?’ And then I go, ‘Well, why not me? Who else besides me deserves this?’ None of us do.”
As People reported in 2020, Doherty started hormone therapy along with another stabilizing drug. Sadly her “cancer is terminal and will likely spread to her brain, lungs, and liver.”
In 2019, Doherty told Health Magazine of the moment she was initially diagnosed, according to US Weekly. “There was a lump, and I had a mammogram and then a biopsy.”
“When I got the results, I was in the car with my mom, and I just knew. The longer I sat, the more it started sinking in. Then I started crying. I called my husband and told him. And from there, I just put together a team.”
In 2020, after being told the cancer had returned, Doherty spoke with Elle in September 2020. She admitted she was preparing for the end, but there was still something she needed to do.
“I haven’t sat down to write letters. That’s something I need to do. There are things I need to say to my mom. I want my husband to know what he’s meant to me,” she explained.
“But whenever it comes time for me to do it, it feels so final. It feels like you’re signing off, and I’m not signing off. I feel like I’m a very, very healthy human being. It’s hard to wrap up your affairs when you feel like you’re going to live another 10 or 15 years.”
And while the prognosis wasn’t the most optimistic, Doherty was planning to make the most of the time she had left. “I try to treasure all the small moments that most people don’t really see or take for granted.”
“The small things are magnified for me. We have this endless well within us, and it’s just about continuing to dig in that well for the strength to face adversity — and so that we can also see all the beauty,” Doherty told Elle.
Over the last several years, Doherty chose to use her social media to also speak about her battle. While talking with Health, the actress admitted her goal was simply to be “as honest as possible.”
“And then it became very important to me that I was there for people who were going through it. I would never give medical advice because I’m not a doctor, but I would always say, ‘Advocate for yourself.’ And also, I get a little less trolls and haters on social media now, so that’s good. I think because cancer stripped me of my defense mechanisms, it allowed people to see all sides of me.”
She told ET that the “unknown is always the scariest part. Is the chemo going to work? Is the radiation going to work? You know, am I going to have to go through this again, or am I going to get secondary cancer?”
Doherty continued saying, “Everything else is manageable. Pain is manageable. You know, living without a breast is manageable. It’s the worry of your future and how your future is going to affect the people that you love.”
While talking with Good Morning America, Doherty revealed that she thought cancer “made me a better actor.”
“I also think it made me a better human being. It takes down all your walls, all your barriers, everything that life sort of threw at you … You’re guarding yourself, so yeah, that all comes tumbling down,” she continued.
She told Good Morning America that she would never give up. “You really have to dig deep to face cancer, and in that, you find all this stuff that you had hidden away. And it’s beautiful things that you find: You find the vulnerability, you find your trust in people again. You find forgiveness.”
“I’m going to keep fighting to stay alive.”