Hayden Panettiere, who starred in the television series ‘Heroes’ and ‘Nashville,’ dies at 36

Hayden Panettiere, a former child actor who rose to fame and starred in TV shows Heroes and Nashville, died Aug. 16 in South Carolina. She was 36.

South Carolina’s Greenville County Coroner’s Office confirmed her death, saying she was in cardiac arrest before she died. Emergency medical services responded to a 911 call reporting a cardiac arrest at 1:51 p.m. on Sunday at a residence in Greenville, where they found Ms. Panettiere unresponsive. She was pronounced dead at 2:32 p.m. after lifesaving measures were attempted. There were no signs of trauma, and the cause of death needs further investigation, the office said in a statement.

In May, Ms. Panettiere released a memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, in which she detailed her life growing up in the spotlight, and her struggles with postpartum depression, substance abuse, and domestic abuse.

She began acting as a child, gaining her first television credit before she turned 5 on the soap opera One Life to Live. At 10, she starred in the movie Remember the Titans.

Her big break came when she played a high school cheerleader with regenerative superpowers in Heroes in 2006; the TV series ran for four seasons. She later portrayed rising country artist Juliette Barnes on Nashville. She also had roles in the Scream horror franchise, Bring It On: All or Nothing and the rom-com I Love You, Beth Cooper.

Tributes to the actor poured in Monday. “I wish the world had more time with you because I had a burning curiosity about who you were becoming. I saw this beautiful Phoenix rising from the ashes,” actor Viola Davis posted on Instagram.

In an interview on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast released in May, Ms. Panettiere described her debilitating anxiety, alcoholism, and custody battle over her child, circumstances she said were written into her character on Nashville. “It felt like it never ended. I didn’t know where Juliette began and Hayden ended,” she said.

In her memoir and press tour interviews, she described her struggles with postpartum depression, drugs, and alcohol, and the death of her brother three years ago. She also discussed the pressure to please everyone and her fractured relationship with her mother, who served as her manager for years in her childhood, where “everything was business.”

“I finally feel like I have shaken off all of this darkness and this negativity. … And that means I closed one door and another door is opened,” she said on the podcast. “And I can feel all the … exciting possibilities. I feel like I have a lot more life to live.”

Ms. Panettiere began acting when she was 11 months old, auditioning for a Playskool train commercial. By 1994, she landed a role on ABC’s soap opera One Life to Live.

“Part of me just wanted to have friends, a place at a cafeteria table, teachers who were kind to me, and lots of fun at recess. But another part of me loved the rush I got from acting and the fact that it made Mom so proud,” she wrote in her memoir.

At 10 years old, she had caught the attention of the casting director for Remember the Titans. She went on to play Sheryl Yoast, a football-loving preteen. “As Sheryl, I was strong and authentic, and on Remember the Titans I was the happiest I’d ever felt as an actor,” Ms. Panettiere wrote.

Soon after, at 12, she secured a guest role as the nerdy babysitter on Malcolm in the Middle. The role was thanks to her mother, Lesley Vogel, who had played the wife of Bryan Cranston’s character on Loving. In her memoir, Ms. Panettiere recalled Cranston, an episode director for Malcolm, saying, “Hayden is so wrong for this role, but we’re going to make this work.”

Once Ms. Panettiere turned 17, she was well known by casting executives, and she was asked to audition for the role of Claire Bennet — the Texas cheerleader with self-healing powers on NBC’s Heroes. She is best known for her performance in Heroes and her role as Juliette Barnes on Nashville.

Barnes’ struggles with postpartum depression and addiction mirrored Ms. Panettiere’s life. In her memoir, Ms. Panettiere wrote about realizing the Nashville writers were modeling the script after her life; playing Barnes became “looking in a funhouse mirror, seeing a distorted reflection,” and diving “headfirst into my own hell.” She took a leave of absence from the show to seek professional treatment.

Ms. Panettiere had long struggled with body dysmorphia, anxiety, and depression, according to her memoir. In the book, she described one paparazzi photograph of herself that showed the back of her thighs. A magazine published it with a banner over her legs: “CELLULITE.”

At an industry event, when she was about 16, a former representative pulled her aside to offer her a “happy pill” before a press interview, she recalled in her memoir. The pills, Ms. Panettiere wrote, “were the gateway drug that ushered me toward the good of pharmaceuticals and the downfall of addiction.”

While nerves pushed her forward as a child actor, they eventually overtook her, she wrote. She was prescribed Klonopin but turned to alcohol since it interfered less with work.

After the birth of her daughter in 2014, her drinking increased as she dealt with postpartum depression. Antidepressants wouldn’t mix well with alcohol, and “I wasn’t ready to stop drinking,” Ms. Panettiere said on a 2023 television appearance. Around the same time, an old neck injury had flared up, and she’d begun taking opioids, she said.

Ms. Panettiere developed jaundice from alcohol abuse. In the memoir, she recalled a doctor’s warning that she’d be dead in five years if she didn’t stop drinking.

She put herself in rehab during the middle of production for the fourth season of Nashville in 2015. The producers temporarily wrote her character out of the script. By her return, Ms. Panettiere’s personal life matched much of the script: Juliette Barnes had postpartum depression, an alcohol and pill addiction, and an impending divorce.

At the time of writing her 2026 memoir, Ms. Panettiere was in recovery.

Ms. Panettiere’s personal life was relentlessly complex and often tragic. Her parents separated in 2008 while Ms. Panettiere was starring on Heroes, and their protracted divorce proceedings concluded in 2016.

Ms. Panettiere was in an on-and-off relationship with the Ukrainian heavyweight fighter Wladimir Klitschko from 2009 to 2018. The couple got engaged in 2013 but never married.

After the birth of their daughter, Kaya, in 2014, Ms. Panettiere’s postpartum depression led her to seek treatment for substance abuse. In 2018, Klitschko requested full custody of Kaya in Ukraine; Ms. Panettiere granted it.

From 2018 to 2022, Ms. Panettiere dated actor Brian Hickerson. Their breakup resulted in Ms. Panettiere obtaining a protective order against Hickerson, and her memoir describes their relationship as physically abusive.

Ms. Panettiere’s brother, Jansen — a fellow actor — died in 2023 at 28 from complications of an enlarged heart. Ms. Panettiere, 33 at the time, said she had “lost half my soul.”

In adulthood, Ms. Panettiere had a difficult relationship with Vogel, her mother, she said. A former soap opera actor, Vogel was her daughter’s manager early on, and she disputed Ms. Panettiere’s accounts of being pushed too hard in her childhood acting years.

Besides her father and her mother, survivors include her daughter, who lives with Klitschko. Ms. Panettiere had said in May she maintained a strong bond with her daughter and remained close to Klitschko.