Hayden Panettiere, star of ‘Heroes,’ dies at 36
The actress, who leaves behind a 12-year-old daughter, began her career as a child actor and appeared in ‘Nashville’ and ‘A Bug’s Life.’ Her younger brother died in 2023 of a heart condition
Thirty-six year old American actress Hayden Panettiere passed away Sunday, August 16, as confirmed by sources close to her in a statement sent to People magazine late in the afternoon. “It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden,” the statement said. “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.” For now, the family has decided not to disclose the cause of her death. Her father, Skip Panettiere, has asked for “privacy” in a statement released on ABC, while her family “takes time to process this unimaginable loss.” Her publicist told NBC that an investigation is underway and that “we should know more tomorrow [Monday].”
Panettiere, who was born in upstate New York and would have turned 37 next Friday, began her career as a child actress. She rose to fame with the 1998 Pixar film A Bug’s Life when she was just eight years old. However, she became more widely known for her role in the series Heroes, in which she played Claire Bennet from 2006 to 2010.
Professionally, Panettiere’s career was not at its peak; she had appeared in the Scream franchise, and in 2023 the sixth installment of the series had been released. She had no major projects lined up. Furthermore, the past few years had been particularly difficult for her personally, as her younger brother, Jansen Panettiere (also an actor who appeared in The Walking Dead and Robots), died suddenly of heart disease in February 2023 at the age of just 28. Months later, she recounted how she had felt hounded by photographers during that time and how she even decided to go into seclusion for a while. But in recent interviews, after breaking up with an abusive boyfriend and publishing her memoir, she said she felt focused, happy, and better. “I feel like, finally, I’ve shaken all that off — all that negativity — and that those doors I’ve been closing over and over have opened, and there are some very exciting possibilities,” she told Jay Shetty.
Panettiere’s parents decided to introduce her to the industry very early on: when she was just 11 months old, her mother began submitting her for television commercials. By the time she was four, she was acting in soap operas: in the mid-1990s, she appeared in about 30 episodes of One Life to Live and in nearly 50 episodes of Guiding Light, a show about a middle-class family in the American Midwest. She also played Maddie on Ally McBeal and provided the voice of Kairi in the video game Kingdom Hearts, as well as Gen in Ice Princess, where she shared scenes with the late Michelle Trachtenberg. But it was her role in Bugs, as Dot, that put her in the spotlight in 1998, as well as her casting as Denzel Washington’s daughter in Remember the Titans in 2000.
And then came Heroes. The show about ordinary superheroes catapulted her to fame at a time when television series may not have enjoyed the cultural prestige they have today, but when they did reach millions of people around the world almost simultaneously. Between 2006 and 2010, out of the series’ 77 episodes, her character Claire — a high school cheerleader with regenerative powers — appeared in 73 of them. She also gained critical acclaim thanks to her role as Juliette Barnes in six seasons of Nashville, which depicted the struggles of country singers in the famous Tennessee city, and was nominated for a Golden Globe in both 2013 and 2014 for Best Supporting Actress in a Miniseries.
When the series ended in 2018, Panettiere slowed down. She appeared in the Scream franchise and in films such as Amber Alert and Sleepwalker, her most recent project. One of her most beloved roles was in Tiger Cruise in 2004, where she shared the screen with her brother.
It was precisely during the filming of Heroes that she met Milo Ventimiglia (known for Gilmore Girls and This Is Us). They began dating in 2007, when he was 30 and she was 18, with the relationship ending in 2009.
Panetierre discusses this in This Is Me: A Reckoning, the memoir she published in mid-May that went on to become a bestseller. In it, she also recounted her struggles with alcohol. “The problem wasn’t about what was or wasn’t wrong in my life. The issue was that I had everything I’d ever wanted, and I was still unhappy. I had postpartum depression, and that was awful.”
In the book, she also recounted how, shortly after that breakup, she began a relationship with Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko. Together, they had a daughter, Kaya, in 2014; she spoke publicly about the challenges she faced after the baby’s birth and how she had dealt with postpartum depression. After a decade of on-and-off relationship, Panettiere and Klitschko decided to split up in 2018: just as they were about to get married, he unexpectedly called off the ceremony. In 2018, Panettiere gave up her fight for custody of their daughter and granted it to Klitschko, whom she describes as an “incredible father.” “I’ve always wanted her here, and I’ll always miss her,” she said on Shetty’s podcast. “I always want to hold her in my arms, but my life can’t be like that right now.” In her memoir, she wrote: “Not living under the same roof every day has been the hardest experience of my life.”
After the breakup, the actress met Brian Hickerson, with whom she said she had gone through one of the most difficult periods of her life, which she described as “traumatic.” In 2020, Hickerson was charged with four felonies of domestic violence, as well as two felonies of assault with a deadly weapon and one felony of witness tampering, along with a misdemeanor assault charge. After pleading guilty to two felonies of causing bodily injury to Panettiere, he was sentenced to 45 days in prison.
In her autobiography, for which she embarked on a promotional tour across much of the United States, she also spoke about her sexuality and how she had hidden certain aspects of it during her youth. “That’s something about me I was never able to share with the world, because it was just never the right time. It was either I was too young, and I was being forced to be perfect at all times. I was not encouraged to just be myself. Then came the period where it felt like people coming out, especially women, saying that they were bisexual or liked girls, was a fad. I was afraid that if I was honest, it was going to be like me jumping on the bandwagon. It was a very difficult topic to articulate properly,” she said in a preview given to Us Weekly magazine. “Now that I know that this book is coming out, and that I’ve chosen to share it with the world, I’m comfortable to confidently say that yes, I am bisexual. I said it! This is the first time I got to say it out loud.”
The promotion of This Is Me, published on May 19, had brought her joy and a resurgence in her popularity. She had made the rounds at newsrooms and on television sets, and was very active on social media — her Instagram account has 1.1 million followers. After recounting in the book difficult episodes of substance abuse, depression, anxiety, her eight-month stint in rehab, and body dysmorphia — and explaining her strained relationship with her mother and how she had learned of her brother’s death over the phone — she felt liberated. As she told The New York Times in an interview: “I can’t believe I made it out of all this alive.”
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