The Washington Post May 26th 1991
Brenda, who moved to that affluent Zipcode with her twin brother, Brandon, and their parents, is "a reserved Midwestern teen who finds herself struggling to assimilate into the lifestyle of Beverly Hills," reads the Fox data. "She is faced with the decision of adhering to the ideals taught by her parents or doing whatever it takes to be accepted by her new socially advanced high school peers."

Twenty-year-old Shannen Doherty, on the other hand, is self-confident, knows her own mind and has been acting since she was 10. She has showed up in two Disney Channel films, two television movies, and several series (including "Father Murphy," "21 Jump Street" and "Life Goes On"), and played bitchy teenager Heather Duke in the theatrical cult-comedy "Heathers" (1989).

But the fans who hoped for a glimpse of her in April as she visited five cities knew her as Brenda Walsh from "Beverly Hills, 90210." So many teens were hanging around her hotel lobby in Pittsburgh and calling her room that she asked to have her calls screened. The concierge was uncooperative, she said.

"Sometimes people have preconceived ideas about actors and it's not always positive," she said. "I walked in and they instantly had attitude against me. I called the manager and asked him to screen my calls -- not block my calls, screen them. I know it's possible because every hotel I've ever stayed in has done that for me. And he proceeds to tell me I'm no more special than the next person and who did I think I was to ask for special treatment. I said, 'I will guarantee you will never get another Fox client staying in this hotel again.' I don't think of myself as special, but when you need security, you need security."

Doherty not only complained to Fox's home office, she and traveling companion Katie Horberg took their own sort of revenge. "We sort of redecorated the room. We moved the furniture like all around. We didn't, like, trash anything. Actually they probably left it because it looked really good."

Devilish laughter over Doherty's lunch: mineral water, salad with Thousand Island dressing, and chicken-and-seafood stir-fry ("can you make it without the seafood?").

Heather Duke might have done that, but Brenda Walsh wouldn't have, and Brenda doesn't have an evil twin, either. Her twin, Brandon, played by Jason Priestly, is just as sincere as she is. That's the way series creator Darren Star wanted them to be, wholesome foils to faster-track kids from Southern California.

After all, Southern California is the place to be, right? Shannen Doherty has lived there since she was 6, having had the misfortune to be born in Memphis, Tenn., a place she said she does not care for. She and her older brother grew up around Los Angeles, and she's an enthusiastic fan of the L.A. Kings hockey team. Their father, Tom, is an investor, she said, and their mother, Rosa, whom she described as a Southern-born redhead, runs a facial salon.

Shannen, a slender young woman with long, dark hair and a pale complexion devoid of any California tan, got off to an unconventional beginning when Rosa Doherty altered the spelling of her daughter's name on the birth certificate.

"They wanted me to be different," she explained.

"And my brother is Sean: S-E-A-N. He said, 'If you're going to mention me, will you spell my name right, since I'm going to be president of the United States.' And he will be president. He is so brilliant. He got, like, an almost perfect score on his SATs. He's getting a scholarship to graduate school at USC."

Don't be surprised if the senior students from West Beverly Hills High School take a class trip to Washington, D.C. After all, series creator Darren Star grew up here (his parents live in Potomac). And like her brother, who is active in county-level Republican politics, Shannen Doherty admires George Bush.

"Bush is, like, one of my favorites," she said. "I have so much respect for him. I loved Reagan too. If I had three wishes, my first would be to meet George Bush. And I like Dan {Quayle} too. He's had a really hard rap. He will forever get a hard rap unless he does something really intelligent, but then everybody will be amazed."

Doherty said she attended Le Lycee Francais, which she described as "a private French school in L.A. It's actually one of the top five high schools in the country. I did very well in school -- I graduated with a 4.0 and I could have gone to Princeton or USC or any college of my choice, coming from that school with the honors I graduated with."

Alas, she's no longer fluent in French: "When you don't use it constantly, you really lose it," she said. "It's so different from our language." And since her acting career comes first these days, she plans to take "Berkeley college correspondence courses and business courses."

At 20, Shannen Doherty said she has already endured hard times. She blames her former accountant for the loss of much of her earnings, and after she made "Heathers," there was a dry spell in her career during which she lived briefly in San Francisco and New York.

"It was a really hard time in my life," she said. "It really taught me a lot. When I turned 18, I had quite a few dollars stolen from me from my old accountant. I wasn't really aware of what was going on ... All of a sudden you wake up and go to your trust fund when you're 18 and you're owing it all to the government because your accountant didn't pay taxes because he was taking all your money. I had thought, 'Well, when I turn 18 I'll have this nice little trust fund,' and I didn't.

"And then I turned 19 and I got the job {"Beverly Hills, 90210"}, so everything was okay. I think it all works out for the best because you learn a lot about yourself. You come from an attitude that 'Wow, if you have money, everything's perfect,' but you learn that's not true.

"It made me face reality a little bit more. I look back on it as a really good learning experience. I believe in God very much and I believe that He looks out for me no matter what, so there was a reason why I went through that because it's going to help me later in my life. You can turn any experience into a learning experience, I believe. You have to have the right kind of attitude and the right frame of mind to be able to do it. Every experience helps you live your life."

After Doherty beat out a New York actress for the part of Brenda Walsh, she helped select the actor to play Brandon. Perhaps partly because both of them have light eyes and dark hair, Jason Priestly got the part. "They wanted to match the actor to me," she said. "We're real good together."

But the hour-long installments took a toll. "I'm in every episode and I was featured a lot and they can't, like, write me out of an episode and give me some rest. I was really tired and I had the 'flu and bronchitis and it, like, kept coming back to me. It would go away for, like, three days and then it would come right back. So when I wrapped work, I was really tired and just had to, like, take a couple of weeks off to try to recuperate."

After the five-city publicity tour in May, she and Priestly and co-stars Gabrielle Carteris, Jennie Garth and Ian Ziering flew to London on May 10 to receive from Prince Edward recognition for the series, which has become popular in England. They returned May 14 to begin wardrobe fittings and script readings and to make the first episode of the new season, which begins in July. They'll wrap up production by Jan. 5, 1992, she said.

New writers brought aboard after the turn of the year haven't revealed much about their plans, but she thinks that "one of the younger boys will be killed off, within the first three episodes. It's not even a character that has a very big part, not a Walsh family member."

Doherty also foresees that the Walshes may fall upon hard times financially, making their situation among the rich of Beverly Hills even more difficult.

So the little series that went up against NBC's "Cheers" on Thursday nights has begun its second-season production now, and Shannen Doherty has a legion of fans. But even fame has its annoyances, among them "stupid interviews" with teen magazines: "'What's your favorite color? How tall are you? Do you have a boyfriend? What kind of lipstick are you using?'" Doherty mimics. Now, she no longer does them.

"I won't sit down and take the time, because I just don't feel it's going to help with my career," she said. "I mean, you see all these young teen celebrities like Alyssa Milano and Kirk Cameron who do all the teen magazines. When you do teen magazines, it gets you on top real fast. You make a lot of money real fast, you get endorsements and go to Japan and cut an album that you'd probably be embarrassed it if ever came in the States. You've made a lot of money and you're a teen celebrity.

"But if you ever want a serious acting career, if you want to be a Meryl Streep or a Gene Tierney, then you're going to have even harder struggles. Nobody is going to take you seriously.

"It's a big difference between being in acting for the wrong reasons and being in it for the right reasons. If you do it for the art, because you love it, if you're willing to starve and wait for a good job, then I think that you're in it for the right reasons.

"I know I starved. For, like, a year, I went without work. I was absolutely broke. And I got offered every horror film in the book, and I said no to every single one of them because I wasn't willing to compromise, to sacrifice the art."