Hayden Panettiere, a onetime child star who soared to fame in the TV shows “Heroes” and “Nashville” while enduring struggles with alcohol addiction and depression, has died. She was 36.
Police said Panettiere was found unresponsive in an apartment in Greenville, South Carolina, shortly before 2 p.m. Sunday. Lifesaving measures were performed but she was pronounced dead at the scene.
No cause of death has been determined and Panettiere's death remains under investigation. An autopsy found no signs of trauma and police said officers saw no signs of foul play.
The television and film performer, who would have turned 37 on Friday, had been open about her private battles and wrote at length about them in the memoir, “This Is Me,” which came out in May. She described lifelong scars from her early fame, and acknowledged being addicted to alcohol and enduring postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter, Kaya, with Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko in 2014.
“It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden,” her father, Skip Panettiere, said in a statement provided to ABC. “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.”
A publicist for Panettiere did not provide any additional details in response to inquiries from The Associated Press.
Panettiere started out as a child actor
Panettiere was one of two children born to Skip Panettiere, a former New York City fire captain, and Lesley Vogel, a former soap opera star who had been the prime force behind her early career before the two became estranged. Panettiere began acting in commercials and soap operas, including as the ever-troubled Lizzie Spaulding on “Guiding Light.” In “This Is Me,” she wrote that the traumas her character endured, from being kidnapped to killing her mother’s boyfriend, led her to associate “catastrophe with adoration.”
“Grown-ups gave me positive attention when — as an actor — I failed, got sick, screamed and cried, killed, grieved, and suffered,” she wrote. “Is it any wonder why I’ve faced so many real struggles in my life? I’ve often wondered whether — unintentionally — I’ve brought on my traumas because I’m wired to think they’re good for me.”
She had much warmer memories of her role as a cheerleader with supernatural powers in “Heroes,” which propelled her to fame in 2006. The series revolved around the mantra: “Save the cheerleader, save the world.”
“I think ‘Heroes’ is really hot because it’s just a really great combination of everything that people love — they love reality, they love sci-fi and things like ‘X-Men’ where they get to dream of something bigger,” Panettiere told the AP in 2008. “And at the core of it are these human stories that people can relate to, very rugged. And it’s just grabbed everyone in every age group.”
She went on to win three Teen Choice Awards for that role and was nominated for a Grammy for a children’s spoken word album, “A Bug’s Life: Read-Along,” also voicing a role in the Disney animated movie.
Panettiere later played a brash country upstart opposite Connie Britton on “Nashville,” which aired on ABC for four seasons before being canceled and revived on CMT. She did her own singing in the show, which scored some hits on country charts, spawned U.S. tours and earned Panettiere two supporting actress Golden Globe nominations. Eleven songs that Panettiere recorded for “Nashville” appeared on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs charts during the show’s run, including two featuring Britton.
She checked herself into rehab
Panettiere’s daughter, now 11, began living with Klitschko full-time in Ukraine when she was 2. At the time, the actor was struggling with mental health and addiction.
“I think there’s been this very common misconception that I just gave up my child,” she said in an interview with podcaster Jay Shetty in May. “That could not be farther from the truth.”
She said she was in a “horrible cycle for years of battling depression and anxiety and alcoholism and substance abuse” while “just trying to find my way back, my way out of the darkness.”
She entered rehab in 2015, while filming “Nashville.”
“I was the one who put myself in the first treatment center. I was drowning,” she said in a 2023 interview with Women’s Health magazine.
Panettiere had endured numerous family struggles, and tragedy. Her parents' marriage was strained, and eventually ended. Her younger brother, Jansen Panettiere, who was also an actor, died of a heart condition in 2023, at age 28. Years earlier, Hayden had made the painful decision to part professionally with her mother, who throughout her childhood had “defined and driven her” and watched her “struggle, learn, grow, fall apart, and triumph.”
“She and I spent so much time together, so deeply enmeshed in each other’s lives, that we started grating on each other,” Panettiere wrote in her memoir. “I hated when Mom whispered about other actors during auditions, positive that they could hear her compare them to me. I hated when Mom went to industry parties and got tipsy on the merlot she loved.”
In recent years, she had been in a tumultuous relationship with actor Brian Hickerson.
On Shetty’s podcast, Panettiere recalled how she exploded into the public eye through “Heroes,” including the first time she was tracked by the paparazzi. She described her response as “sheer terror.” In her memoir, she would remember unwanted encounters with fellow celebrities — from an Oscar-winning actor-director exposing himself to her to being forced into bed with a “famous thirtysomething British singer-songwriter.”
She had spoken positively about her experience filming “Remember the Titans,” saying she felt similar to the character she played — Sheryl Yoast, the opinionated, football-loving daughter of Will Patton’s Coach Bill Yoast. Panettiere also appeared in two of the “Scream” movies, and starred as the title character in the 2009 film “I Love You Beth Cooper.”
In her memoir, Panettiere described herself as an “optimist to the core” who refused to be defined by tragedy.
“One thing I know from my 36 years in the public eye is this: Life is a process that evolves day by day, year by year and — like it or not — you are engaged in a cycle of growth until the moment you take your last breath,” she wrote.
Associated Press writer Dave Collins and National Writer Hillel Italie contributed reporting.
