FAMILY
MATTERS
L. A .-BRED TORI SPELLING
SHARES HER HEART—AND
ACHES—WITH FANS
Growing up as the daughter of Hollywood’s
most famous TV producer, Tori Spelling
was used to extravagance. Once, before a
trip to the beach, mom Candy had the
family’s nanny bury seashells in the sand for
her kids to find. “My childhood was really
weird,” Spelling has admitted.
When she first caught wind of a new
teen drama her father was producing,
Spelling, then 16, was determined to win a
role. She auditioned under a pseudonym,
fooling exactly no one, and landed the
part of Donna, the high school’s
high-spirited social butterfly. “You
assume that nepotism had something to
do with her getting the 90210 part,” a
Washington Post critic wrote. But her
costars saw it differently. “She works her
buns off,” said castmate Joe E. Tata.
As Donna became one of the most
popular characters on the show, Spelling,
who continued to live at her parents’
sprawling mansion in Los Angeles during
much of the filming, put her own life on
hold. “It kind of sucked that I didn’t get to
go to college,” she wrote in her 2008
memoir Stori Telling. But castmates
became friends—and more—including
Spelling’s real-life boyfriend Brian Austin
Green. “In the course of the 10 years the
show was on the air, everyone in the cast
pretty much slept with everyone else,”
Spelling wrote.
Four years after 90210 ended, she
married actor Charlie Shanian, and the
following year, while filming a TV movie,
she fell for actor Dean McDermott. The
pair married in 2006 and now have five
children. They chronicled their bumpy
union and financial woes in a series of
reality shows. Spelling also shared the
emotional fallout after McDermott
admitted to cheating and sex addiction
on her own show, True Tori, in 2014.
Despite the drama, however, the couple
stuck together. Spelling said she “never
for a moment” wanted to end things. “I
said, ‘I love this man. If there is a way to
work it out, I want to try to do that,’ ” she
told People in 2017.HOLLYWOOD KIDS
Tori with dad Aaron
Spelling in 1983. Above:
Spelling, her husband,
Dean McDermott, and
their children.