Hayden Panettiere, the actress who became a fixture of a generation’s television viewing as the brave, magnetic cheerleader Claire Bennet on NBC’s Heroes, has died at 36. Her death this week has drawn tributes from across the industry and from the millennial audience that grew up alongside her.
Many were first introduced to Panettiere through Heroes, where her character’s regenerative powers made her effectively indestructible and where more than 14 million live viewers followed the series at its height. Yet there were already many chapters before that role. Born in New York, she began acting in commercials at just 11 months old.
As a young actress she voiced Princess Dot in A Bug’s Life, appeared in 27 episodes of the soap opera One Life to Live, played Ally McBeal’s surprise daughter in the legal drama’s fifth season, starred with Michelle Trachtenberg in the Disney film Ice Princess, and acted alongside Solange Knowles in Bring It On: All or Nothing the same year Heroes began. After the show lifted her to a new level of fame, her face became familiar from magazine covers and campaigns for brands including Neutrogena and Candie’s.
After Heroes wrapped in 2010, Panettiere found her next major role in ABC’s Nashville, a soapy country-music drama in which she starred as Juliette Barnes, a musician determined to keep her crown as Queen of Country, opposite Connie Britton. The part unlocked new dimensions of her range, including her singing.
In a later memoir, Panettiere reflected with unusual candor on her early experiences of exploitation as a child actor, and on her subsequent battles with severe postpartum depression and substance abuse. “The problem wasn’t about what is or isn’t wrong in my life,” she wrote. “The issue was that I had everything I’d ever wanted, a great job, a baby, friends, a fiance, and yet I was still unhappy. I wanted more than anything to get back to that place of happiness, but I didn’t even know where that place was anymore.”
She also described how storylines drawn close to her real-life struggles retraumatized her over the course of a six-year run while she was still contending with addiction and severe anxiety. “Every time I read the day’s script, it was like I was looking in a fun-house mirror, seeing a distorted reflection of myself,” she wrote. Loved for playing an invincible girl on screen, she was remembered just as much for her honesty off screen about the ways she was hurting, and for speaking openly in the hope of reaching new mothers and others facing similar battles.
This is a sensitive story. Anyone struggling with mental health or substance use can reach out to a local health professional or support line for help.
