She shot to fame as a teenager, but always felt like an outsider in Hollywood. Now she has started a podcast and written a memoir for women who find themselves at a standstill
A few years ago, Jennie Garth was feeling lost. Her three daughters were growing up – her eldest had already left home – and Garth was bored and unfulfilled. In March 2023, she noted in her diary that potential acting jobs were “few and far between, if at all really”. She rarely heard from her agent, and she didn’t want to get in touch with him “just to hear how different the business has become, how they just aren’t looking for a woman my age, with my stereotyped abilities”. As an actor, and one who had been particularly typecast, she was used to rejection, she wrote, “but this is getting a little scary”.
In the 90s, Garth had been a TV superstar. She was 18 when the teen drama Beverly Hills, 90210 came out, in which she played Kelly Taylor – rich and spoilt on the surface, traumatised underneath. Although she continued to work after it came to an end in 2000, not least on the show’s spin-offs, it must be hard to have hit your career high in your first job. More fulfilment came from other areas in Garth’s life – she loved motherhood – although she found the end of her marriage to her daughters’ father, the actor Peter Facinelli, so traumatic that she ended up in hospital after an accidental overdose and had a spell in rehab.
