Hayden Panettiere, 36-year-old American actress, passed away this Sunday. This was confirmed by sources close to her environment in a statement sent to People magazine late in the afternoon, U.S. time. “It is with deep sadness that we must share the tragic death of our beloved Hayden,” they stated. “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 of people who saw her on screen.” For now, the family has decided not to share the causes of her death. Her father, Skip Panettiere, has requested “privacy” in a statement issued on the ABC television network, while her family “processes this unimaginable loss.” Her publicist explained to NBC that there is an ongoing investigation and that “more will be known tomorrow.”
Panettiere, who was born north of New York, would have turned 37 next Friday, began her career as a child actress. In fact, she rose to fame with the Pixar film A Bug’s Life in 1998, when she was just eight years old. However, she became especially known for her role in the series Heroes, in which she played Claire Bennet, between 2006 and 2010.
Professionally, Panettiere’s career was not at a peak at the moment; she participated in the Scream saga and in 2023 had released the sixth installment of the franchise. She had no known projects. Additionally, the last few years had been especially hard personally, because her younger brother, Jansen Panettiere (also an actor who worked on The Walking Dead and Robots), had died suddenly from a heart condition in February 2023, at only 28 years old. Months later, she recounted how she felt harassed by photographers at that time and how she even decided to withdraw for a while. “I had to see horrible images of ‘paparazzi’ leaving Jansen’s funeral, which took place in a very private location, and it was shocking,” she later said in People. But in recent interviews, after breaking up with an abusive boyfriend and publishing her memoirs, she claimed to be focused, happy, better. “I feel like I’ve finally gotten rid of all that, all that negativity, that those doors I kept closing and closing have opened, and that there are very exciting possibilities,” she told Jay Shetty.
It was very early when Panettiere’s parents decided to start her in the business: at just 11 months, her mother began presenting her as a candidate for television commercials. At just over four years old, she was already acting in soap operas: in the mid-nineties she appeared in about thirty episodes of One Life to Live, and in almost 50 of The Guiding Light, about a middle-class family from the American Midwest. She was also Maddie in Ally McBeal and the voice of Kairi in the video game Kingdom Hearts, as well as Gen in Ice Princess, where she shared scenes with the also deceased Michelle Trachtenberg. But it was her role in A Bug’s Life, as Princess Dot, that launched her into the spotlight in 1996, as well as the role of Denzel Washington’s daughter in Remember the Titans in 2000.
And then came Heroes. The fiction about ordinary superheroes catapulted her to fame at a time when television series perhaps did not enjoy the social cultural prestige they have today, but they did reach millions of people around the world almost simultaneously. Between 2006 and 2010, out of the 77 episodes of the series, her character, high school cheerleader Claire, who had regenerative powers, appeared in 73. Also thanks to her character Juliette Barnes in the six seasons of Nashville, which portrayed the difficulties of country singers in the famous Tennessee city, she improved her critical acceptance and was nominated, both in 2013 and 2014, for the Golden Globes as best supporting actress for the miniseries.
When the series ended in 2018, Panettiere slowed down. She participated in the Scream saga and in films such as Amber Alert or Sleepwalker, her last project. One of her most beloved roles was in Raising Helen in 2004, where she shared the screen with her brother.
It was precisely during the filming of Heroes that she had a romance with her co-star Milo Ventimiglia (known for the series Gilmore Girls and This Is Us). They started dating in 2007, when he was 30 and she was 18, in a relationship that ended in 2009. “The problem was that I couldn’t put ‘I love you’ before ‘I love you’ [in a deeper sense], and at that time I didn’t realize or understand why it bothered me so much,” she explained recently in her memoirs. “I could only say ‘I love you’ casually. Being older, he was much more aware of what that meant. And that said a lot.”
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All this has been recounted in This Is Me: A Reckoning (which could be translated as This Is Me: A Settling of Scores), the memoir she published in mid-May last year and which became a huge bestseller. In it, she also recounted her problems with alcohol. “The problem wasn’t about what was right or wrong in my life. The issue was that I had everything I had wished for, and I was still unhappy. I had postpartum depression, and that was crap,” read one of the excerpts.
In it, she also narrated how shortly after that breakup she started a relationship with Ukrainian boxer Vladimir Klitschko. Together they had a daughter, Kaya, in 2014; she spoke publicly about her difficulties after the birth of the girl and how she had dealt with postpartum depression. After a decade of ups and downs, Panettiere and Klitschko decided to separate in 2018: when they were about to get married, he canceled the wedding unexpectedly, and then returned, remorseful, but she decided not to get back with him. In 2018, Panettiere gave up her fight for custody of the girl and gave it to Klitschko, whom she calls an “incredible father.” “I’ve always wanted her here, and I will always miss her,” she said on Shetty’s podcast. “I always want to have her in my arms, but my life can’t be like that now.” In the memoirs, she stated: “Not living under the same roof every day has been the hardest experience of my life.”
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After the separation, the actress met a man named Brian Hickerson, with whom she said she had gone through one of the most complex stages of her life, which she described as “traumatic.” In 2020, Hickerson was charged with four felony counts of domestic violence, as well as two felony counts of assault with a deadly weapon and one felony count of witness tampering, and also a misdemeanor assault charge. After pleading guilty to two felony counts of injuring Panettiere, he was sentenced to serve 45 days in prison. “It’s a very shameful issue,” she reflected in that book published just three months ago. “I’ve always considered myself a strong and resilient woman. The idea that I could allow something like this to happen to me left me stunned. Those who knew me best were also stunned. I tried to keep it secret, as much as possible, because I didn’t want to involve anyone I loved. I already knew they wanted to protect me, and I wanted to protect them, both physically and emotionally. It was humiliating.”
In that autobiography, with which she embarked on a promotional tour across much of the United States, she also spoke about her sexuality and how she had hidden some aspects of it in her youth. “It’s something about me that I could never share with the world because it simply was never the right time. I was too young and was forced to be perfect at all times, I wasn’t encouraged to be myself. Then came the time when it seemed that people, especially women, declaring to be bisexual or liking girls, was a passing trend. I was afraid that if I was honest, they would accuse me of jumping on the bandwagon. It was a difficult topic to address clearly,” she said in a preview granted to Us Weekly. “I’ve decided to share it with the world, I feel comfortable saying confidently yes, I am bisexual. I said it! This is the first time I say it out loud.”
The promotion of This Is Me, published on May 19, would have brought Panettiere joy and a return to her popularity. She had walked through newsrooms and TV sets, and was very active on social media. After narrating in the book difficult episodes of substance abuse, depression, anxiety, rehab (for eight months), and body dysmorphia and explaining her bad relationship with her mother or how she found out about her brother’s death by phone, she felt liberated. As she told The New York Times in an interview: “I can’t believe I was able to come out alive from all this,”
