“I’m still working on myself, all the time” — Hayden Panettiere, 1989–2026

While she had had a successful¹ career as a child actor prior to 2006, Hayden Panettiere catapulted to stardom in the ill-fated Heroes as Claire, a near-indestructible high school cheerleader who’s convinced her friend Zach to secretly film proof of her superpowers. As the series’ main plot kicks in, a future vision of Hiro (Masi Oka) appears to hospice nurse Nathan (Milo Ventimiglia) with an urgent message: Save the cheerleader, save the world.

With those words, Panettiere became the focal point of the series’ first and strongest season. Her storyline borrowed pretty liberally from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but that meant and Panettiere had a role with similar challenges to Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy: she had to project both superhuman resilience and the everyday emotional vulnerability of a teenager.² Unlike Buffy, which stayed a beloved cult classic, Heroes was a genuine ratings smash in that first season, hitting a high of 16.03 million in the show’s ninth episode. Promotions were everywhere; there were tie-in comics and action figures. Emerson Electric Company sued the show because they thought Claire’s ill-fated encounter with one of their garbage disposals made their products look unsafe. The band I See Stars named a song “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World.” Panettiere was 17 in that first season, when someone gave her ‘happy pills’ during the press tour. She described being spotted by paparazzi as “like looking down the barrel of a gun.” By the time she was 18, she was dating her co-star Ventimiglia; he was 29.

We’ve discussed here at Media Magpies, at length, the costs of early fame. Panettiere starred in her first commercial at 11 months and had done 50 by the time she was five. At ten, she was sharing the screen with Denzel Washington in Remember the Titans. Her mother was a retired actress who had high expectations for her daughter’s career, and sharp criticism when she didn’t live up to those expectations. When Panettiere told her mother she wanted her to be just her mother and not a manager, her mother’s words were “You owe me.”

“It never stopped,” Panettiere told Gayle King, and the pressures of performing grew worse when directors and producers realized how good she was at crying on cue. “I didn’t know where my character started and where mine ended.” Heroes was part of a wave of internet fandom that we still haven’t escaped, where fan entitlement and creator arrogance could (and did) interact in increasingly unpleasant ways.³ Panettiere was a pretty blond teenager on a show watched by millions. People were weird about her.

After Heroes, she did some teen movies (including Bring it On: All or Nothing and Ice Princesses with Michelle Trachtenberg), a Scream sequel and a TV movie about Amanda Knox. She landed a major role in the pilot of Nashville as Juliette Barnes, a country-pop diva set against Connie Britton’s Rayna James. Nashville was less of a juggernaut than Heroes, but it was still a critical and commercial success, with Panettiere earning special recognition and even hitting the country music charts with the song “Telescope.” The show also incorporated some of her real-life challenges. “Very few people took the time to come up to me and ask if I was OK. I don’t know that they wanted to know,” she recalled in an interview with Us Magazine.⁴

Speaking of those challenges, her personal life had its share of struggles. She had an off-and-on relationship with Ukranian heavyweight boxer Wladimir Klitschko⁵; he fathered her only child, Kaya, A “wonderful pregnancy” ended with a life-threatening birth, and in the aftermath Panettiere suffered a brutal case of postpartum depression. As with many cases of PPD, Panettiere’s symptoms weren’t recognized immediately; the first time she sought treatment, she was checked into rehab for alcoholism alone. What followed was a series of difficult choices, including several rounds of rehab and relinquishing full custody of Kaya to Klitschko. The internet, of course, reacted in the compassionate and gentle way it treats any woman it considers to have failed at motherhood. I’m sure this was nothing but a boon to her mental health⁶. She had an off-and-on relationship with Brian Hickerson, this one marred by what her lawyer described as “psychological, emotional and severe physical abuse.”

She released her memoir in May of this year, coming out as bisexual⁷ and talking honestly about her career and experiences in Hollywood. As part of the book’s publicity tour, she appeared on Jay Shetty’s podcast, kicking off another round of public debate about her life.

It’s hard to write this one up. Panettiere was a genuinely good actress, who gave the kind of charismatic and strong performances that could anchor a show as silly as Heroes. She did voiceover work for video games and animation and could have done decades more of solid work. She was also failed so very deeply by her family, Hollywood, and American culture that it’s hard not to talk about that. I don’t want one to overshadow the other, but how can I not feel angry over it all? We had clear instructions: Save the cheerleader, save the world, but an awful lot of people don’t care about our children or our world at all, and a distressing number of people preferred to score points off a struggling woman trying to do the best for her child. It’s not true that no one loved Hayden Panettiere ; it’s not true that no one wanted her to succeed. But it is true that not everyone looked out for a teenage girl getting her first taste of fame, and it is true that plenty of armchair critics and frustrated incels chose her as a target for their own pain and insecurities. Hayden Panettiere was never going to fuck you, after all, but maybe she’d catch Twitter at just the right time to see you calling her a shitty mother.

But Hayden Panettiere was more than lost potential. She did years of good work off and on the screen. She protested on behalf of whales, urged young people to vote and was so passionate for D.C. statehood that the city named a day in her honor in 2011.

She was predeceased by her brother Jansen, who she described as her “best friend.” He had his own struggles with substance abuse and died from complications of enlarged heart syndrome in 2023. (The temptation to forego the usual quote for our obituaries and just call this piece “Hayden Panettiere couldn’t catch a fucking break” was quite high.)

At the time of writing, Panettiere’s cause of death is not publicly known, but with the knowledge that mental illness, addiction, and domestic violence all affected her life I’m sharing the following US resources:

In the US (and Canada), call 988 for help at any time. For queer-specific mental health support, contact The Trevor Project at 1-866-488-7386. Call 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) for domestic violence, relationship abuse, and stalking support. For substance abuse, call 1-800-662-HELP (4357) or text your zip code to HELP4U (435748).

Remember, you don’t have to be in active crisis to call a crisis line. The nice people on the other end of the line are perfectly happy to give you a little support whenever it’s needed. It may feel impossible to find, but there are people out there who want to help and are ready to talk whenever you’re ready.

There was joy in Hayden Panettiere’s life; she appears to have built a good relationship with her daughter and father, and there’s real and hard-earned happiness in many of her interviews. I just wish there had been more of it.

1. But we’ll get to that in a bit. ↩︎
2. Gellar had a few advantages there; her mother seems to have been less enthralled with the Hollywood machine, and while the Buffy set was notoriously difficult, Heroes sufferend from a merry-go-round of changing creative teams and priorities. Gellar was also three years older than Panettiere when Buffy began. ↩︎
3. If you find yourself redoing a whole plot because the internet guessed it, maybe don’t do that. Maybe just let fans feel clever rather than screwing your entire series over. Just a thought. ↩︎
4. She was also dealing with a stalker during these years, who called and texted she and her loved ones “every day.” He eventually was sentenced to prison, in 2025. ↩︎
5. They met when she was 19 and he was 33. So. Having said that, they seem to have developed a good relationship as exes and loving parents by the time of her death. ↩︎
6. She also lost Neutrogena as a sponsor because her openness about PPD violated their ‘morality clause.’ Ain’t Hollywood grand? ↩︎
7. She told US Magazine: “Now that I know that this [memoir]  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.” ↩︎