Hayden Panettiere, the actor known for her roles in television shows such as Heroes and Nashville, has died at the age of 36.
Panettiere’s death was confirmed in a statement from her representative to the Guardian on Sunday night, after it was first reported on US network ABC News. No cause of death was given.
“It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden. She was an incredible light and a force of nature who brought immeasurable love and joy to all who knew her — and to the millions who watched her onscreen,” her father, Skip Panettiere, said in a statement.
He asked for privacy “as our family takes time to process this unimaginable loss”.
Born in 1989, Panettiere was a child star who began acting at just 11 months old, appearing in a toy commercial. She made her big screen debut as the voice of Dot in A Bug’s Life, aged nine.
In 2000, she appeared in Remember the Titans. In 2004, she landed her first starring role as the daughter of Bill Pullman’s character in Tiger Cruise on the Disney Channel.
Panettiere rose to global fame at the age of 17 as the invulnerable cheerleader Claire Bennet in Heroes, a series with the well-known, mysterious mantra: “Save the cheerleader, save the world.” The show was a hit and ran for four seasons between 2006 and 2010.
Panettiere also earned two Golden Globe nominations for her performance as the troubled country music star Juliette Barnes on Nashville. Eleven songs that Panettiere recorded for Nashville appeared on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs charts during the show’s run, including two featuring her co-star Connie Britton.
She also appeared as Kirby Reed in 2011’s Scream 4 and 2023’s Scream VI.
In 2014 she gave birth to her daughter, Kaya Klitschko, whom she had with her ex-fiance, the Ukrainian heavyweight boxing champion Wladimir Klitschko. Panettiere gave full custody to Klitschko in 2018 in order to focus on recovering from what she called a “horrible cycle for years of battling depression and anxiety and alcoholism and substance abuse”.
“I didn’t know where the alcoholism was ending and the postpartum was beginning,” Panettiere said in a 2022 interview. “And I ran myself pretty ragged.”
She entered rehab in 2015 while filming Nashville, which ended up informing some of the show’s storylines.
“This hasn’t been easy and there were a lot of ups and downs,” Panettiere told People magazine in 2022. “But I don’t regret even the ugliest things that have happened to me. I feel incredibly accomplished. And I feel like I have a second chance.”
Earlier this year she published a memoir titled This is Me: A Reckoning, which touched on her struggles with fame, postpartum depression, addiction and recovery. In the book Panettiere wrote about the troubling link she made between acting and love: “Directors, fans, and Mom praised me endlessly for my over-the-top dramatic responses. Subconsciously, I began to associate catastrophe with adoration; people loved me because make-believe bad things happened to me.”
In May, she gave an emotional interview to podcaster Jay Shetty about her daughter. “I will always want her here. I always miss her,” she said. “I always want to have my arms wrapped around her, but that’s just not the way life is right at this moment … I have faith that she is going to come to me and that we’re going to have an incredible relationship and bond and friendship that a lot of parents don’t get to have with their kids.”
Panettiere is survived by her father, Skip Panettiere, and her mother, Lesley Vogel, who is also her former manager. Panettiere’s brother Jansen died suddenly in 2023 at the age of 28 from cardiomegaly – an enlarged heart – coupled with aortic valve complications.
