Early Life and Career Beginnings
Shannen Maria Doherty was born in Memphis, Tennessee, the daughter of Rosa, a beauty parlor owner, and Tom Doherty, a mortgage consultant. Doherty has Irish Catholic ancestry on her father's side and English, Scottish, and Scots-Irish ancestry on her mother's side. She was raised in her mother's Southern Baptist denomination.
Doherty had guest spots on TV series including Voyagers! and Father Murphy. When a casting notice was released in Hollywood for a regular role on the popular Little House on the Prairie, she jumped at the opportunity and eventually won the role of Jenny Wilder at the age of 11, thanks in part to actor/producer Michael Landon seeing her guest spot on Father Murphy, which he also produced. Doherty stayed in the series until the show's cancellation in 1983. In 1982, Shannen lent her voice talents to the animated film The Secret of NIMH. In 1985, Doherty starred as Maggie Malene in the teen-comedy movie, Girls Just Want To Have Fun, alongside actresses Helen Hunt and Sarah Jessica Parker.
Doherty was cast as the oldest Witherspoon sibling, Kris, on the family drama Our House, which ran from 1986 to 1988, a role which garnered her several Young Artist Award nominations. She then went on to appear in an episode of Magnum, P.I., followed by an early episode of Airwolf for which she was nominated as 'Best Young Actress: Guest in a Series' at the 6th Youth in Film Awards in 1984. Doherty's first major motion picture role was in Heathers, released in 1989.
Read more about this topic: Shannen Doherty
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, career and/or beginnings:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Our life runs down in sending up the clock.
The brook runs down in sending up our life.
The sun runs down in sending up the brook.
And there is something sending up the sun.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The beginnings of altruism can be seen in children as early as the age of two. How then can we be so concerned that they count by the age of three, read by four, and walk with their hands across the overhead parallel bars by five, and not be concerned that they act with kindness to others?”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)