Hayden Panettiere spent much of her adult life doing something rare in Hollywood: talking openly about the parts of her story that weren’t triumphant. That honesty is part of what made her death, announced Sunday by her father Skip Panettiere, land as such a loss beyond the roles that made her famous. She was 36. Her family has not disclosed a cause of death and has asked for privacy while they grieve.
“An incredible light and a force of nature” is how her father described her, saying she brought immense love and joy to family, friends, and the millions who watched her on screen.
That audience began forming when Panettiere was still a child. She started acting at four years old on the soap opera One Life to Live and built a career that stretched across three decades. Her breakout came with Heroes, the science-fiction series that ran from 2006 to 2010, where she played Claire Bennet, a cheerleader whose regenerative powers became central to the show’s identity and its “save the cheerleader, save the world” tagline. Years later, she found a second signature role as Juliette Barnes, an ambitious country-pop singer on Nashville, earning back-to-back Golden Globe nominations in 2013 and 2014 and placing 11 of her recorded songs on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. Her film work included Remember the Titans, Bring It On: All or Nothing, and the Scream franchise, where she played Kirby Reed across two films.
But the more revealing chapter of her public life came later, in the memoir she released earlier this year, This Is Me: A Reckoning. In it, Panettiere wrote candidly about addiction, recovery, abuse, and motherhood, and about the death of her younger brother Jansen, who died in 2023 at 28 from an enlarged heart. She had called him her only sibling and spoke often about how deeply his loss affected her. She also discussed her struggle with postpartum depression after the 2014 birth of her daughter, Kaya, and in 2018 gave full custody of Kaya to her former partner, boxer Wladimir Klitschko, citing her mental health at the time.
Tributes arrived quickly from people who knew her and people who simply grew up watching her. Selma Blair called the news heartbreaking, Scream VI co-star Melissa Barrera paid tribute, and singer JoJo described it as devastating. SAG-AFTRA said its thoughts were with her daughter, family, and friends, while fans filled her final Instagram post with memories of the roles that had shaped their own lives.
She is survived by her daughter, Kaya.
