Little Home on the Prairie’s Dean Butler Honors Shannen Doherty (Unique)

When Dean Butler displays on his time working with Shannen Doherty, he remembers a younger actress destined for stardom.

Doherty, who died on July 13 at age 53 following nearly a decade with most cancers, landed her first main function as Jenny Wilder on Little Home on the Prairie when she was 11. Whereas working along with her, Butler — who performed Almanzo Wilder, the uncle of Doherty’s character — noticed a “decided, intentional younger lady.”

“There simply was one thing about her — Shannen knew the place she was going,” Butler, 68, tells PEOPLE. “She was a really decided, and also you simply knew that she was going to succeed. You simply knew she had one thing.”

At that time, Doherty was already a assured performer who was “at all times targeted on the scene.”

“I by no means received the sensation that Shannen was self-conscious about something she was doing, however slightly that she was totally linked to what she was attempting to perform within the given scene,” he says. “I believe she had an excellent intuition in regards to the work that she was doing, and I by no means felt working with Shannon that she had any sort of nervousness in regards to the work that she was doing in any respect.”

He provides: “She was simply all in.”

After Doherty’s time on Little Home on the Prairie, she performed a number of iconic roles that will turn into highlights of her appearing profession. In 1989, she confirmed off her darker facet in Heathers, taking part in a member of a highschool’s clique.

Quickly after, she portrayed the rebellious Brenda Walsh in Beverly Hills, 90210. She additionally performed Prue Halliwell, the eldest of three sisters-turned-witches within the WB supernatural drama Charmed.

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On Sunday, July 14, Doherty’s longtime publicist Leslie Sloane confirmed the actress’ dying completely to PEOPLE.

“It’s with a heavy coronary heart that I affirm the passing of actress Shannen Doherty. On Saturday, July 13, she misplaced her battle with most cancers after a few years of combating the illness,” she mentioned in an announcement. “The devoted daughter, sister, aunt and buddy was surrounded by her family members in addition to her canine, Bowie. The household asks for his or her privateness right now to allow them to grieve in peace.”

The Beverly Hills 90210 star was first identified with breast most cancers in 2015, however introduced she had gone into remission in 2017. Nevertheless, by 2019, the most cancers returned. Doherty introduced her prognosis of metastatic stage 4 most cancers publicly in 2020 and in June 2023, shared that the most cancers had unfold to her mind.

Previous to her dying, Doherty usually spoke fondly about her time on Little Home on the Prairie from 1982 to 1983, and dealing with Michael Landon on the Western sequence.

On the Could 27 episode of her podcast, Let’s Be Clear with Shannen Doherty, the actress and her mother Rosa seemed again on the early days of her profession, with Doherty admitting, “That present – Little Home – formed me in so some ways and it nonetheless is the most effective expertise of my whole profession.”

Reflecting on the significantly sturdy bond she shaped with Landon, who performed the household patriarch and died in 1991 from pancreatic most cancers, Doherty mentioned: “I adored him. He was a mentor. He taught me a lot.”

“It is sort of superb as a result of, once I take into consideration the lengthy span of my profession, but additionally how tough some jobs had been — and unenjoyable to be part of, somewhat bit poisonous — it was actually the expertise on Little Home that spurred that zeal on for being an actor,” she informed her mother. “And it was having a mentor like Michael Landon — and I do not care what anyone else’s expertise was like, I do know the reality about that man, and he was simply unbelievable.”

Doherty additionally beforehand mentioned that amongst her “favourite recollections” from her time on Little Home on the Prairie, which aired from 1974 to 1983, was attending to “work with Michael Landon.”

“Simply the issues I discovered from him. He directed a number of the episodes and wrote a number of the episodes,” she mentioned on a March episode of her podcast, including that Landon taught her to “be true to myself” and “embrace my voice, to face up for myself.”