Hayden Panettiere, Credit: Instagram
Hayden Panettiere has died. She was 36. Her family confirmed the news last night in a statement shared through her representative. "It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden," her father, Skip Panettiere, 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." He asked for privacy "as our family takes time to process this unimaginable loss."
No cause of death has been released, and further details were not immediately available. We're not going to speculate about what happened. That information will come out in time and right now, we want to spend this space on who she was on and off screen and my experience working with her.
Panettiere was a working actress before most kids her age had finished elementary school and debuted on the ABC soap One Life to Live in 1994, at age five, and by nine was voicing Princess Dot in Pixar's A Bug's Life. She broke through to a generation of moviegoers as Nicky Yoast, the football-obsessed daughter of Will Patton's assistant coach, in 2000's Remember the Titans, and spent the mid-2000s bouncing between Ally McBeal, Malcolm in the Middle, Tiger Cruise and Ice Princess before landing the role that made her a household name: Claire Bennet, the indestructible cheerleader at the center of NBC's Heroes, beginning in 2006.
