Hayden Panettiere’s Legacy: "I Don't Regret Even the Ugliest Things"

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.

She carried that same star power into Scream 4 in 2011, and later Scream 6 in 2023. From 2012 to 2018, she was Juliette Barnes on ABC's Nashville, a role that, by her own account, would end up running uncomfortably parallel to her real life. Her return to acting in recent years included Amber Alert (2024), A Breed Apart (2025) and her final film, Sleepwalker, released this past January. She also released music of her own over the years. Colleagues remembered her, above all, as someone who worked hard and gave everything to a role, and who never stopped showing up, even when showing up was the hardest thing she had to do.

What She Fought For

Long before "advocacy" was something every celebrity listed in their bio, Panettiere was doing the unglamorous, occasionally dangerous work of it. She became a spokesperson for the Whaleman Foundation and helped launch the "Save the Whales Again!" campaign with her Heroes cast mates in 2007. That same year, at 18, she traveled to Taiji, Japan, and paddled a surfboard directly into the cove where fishermen herd pilot whales and dolphins during the annual hunt,  a confrontation later documented in the Oscar-winning film The Cove. She went back in 2010, this time seeking dialogue with local officials about alternative economies for the town. Asked later whether it was worth the risk, her answer was simple: "I'd do it again." She lobbied on Capitol Hill for international whale protections and was honored by the Animal Welfare Institute for that work. This wasn’t just a quick photo-op cause and she kept returning to it, year after year and it was for this cause that I had meetings with her about when I was at People magazine and her producers were looking for her partner for a documentary on one of her trips to raise awareness for the cause. It was a short meeting via video but she was friendly, professional and positive and her commitment and passion for the work came through and it was rare to see a celebrity so focused on something outside of their work in entertainment. The documentary we talked about didn't end up happening.

What She Struggled With — In Her Own Words

What made Panettiere different from a lot of people in her position is that she talked about the hard parts of her life, in detail, on the record.

She said she was introduced to "happy pills" at 15 by someone on her own team, meant to keep her energetic through press junkets and red carpets. After her daughter, Kaya, was born in 2014, she developed severe postpartum depression that she described as a "total blackout of emotion", a period where the maternal connection she expected simply wasn't there. She self-medicated with alcohol and opioids, and the drinking eventually caused jaundice, with doctors warning her that her liver was failing and that continued drinking could kill her within five years.

"I didn't know where the alcoholism was ending and the postpartum was beginning," she told Good Morning America in 2022. "And I ran myself pretty ragged."

In 2018, at the height of that crisis, she made the decision to give her then-fiancé, Wladimir Klitschko, full custody of Kaya, believing it was the safest option while she got help, a decision she later had to defend publicly against claims that she'd "given away" her daughter. She described her lowest points bluntly: "I'd think I hit rock bottom, but then there's that trap door that opens." And yet she was equally clear that she didn't view the pain as wasted. "I put a lot of work into myself, and I had to be willing to be incredibly honest," she said. "There were a lot of ups and downs, but I don't regret even the ugliest things that have happened to me."

She was also open about the grief that never fully closed, her younger brother, Jansen, died in 2023 at 28 from heart complications. "I will never be able to get over it," she said. "No matter how many years go by, I will never get over his loss." In May of this year, she published a memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, which went further still, detailing childhood grooming in the industry, domestic abuse, and, for the first time publicly, that she was bisexual. In what turned out to be one of her final interviews, she told the parenting outlet Dear Momé: "I'm a work in progress — we all are. I take each day as it comes. I'm doing the work, and I'm doing my best."

That sense of forward motion was still there just weeks before she died. In a raw, two-hour conversation on Jay Shetty's On Purpose podcast this past May, recorded as part of the press tour for her memoir, she sounded like someone who genuinely believed she'd come out the other side. "I finally feel like I have shaken off all of this darkness and this negativity," she said. "And that means that I've closed one door, and another door is opened... I can feel all the exciting possibilities. I feel like I have a lot more life to live."

The Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: What has stayed with me from covering and working with Hayden wasn't the résumé, it was the transparency. She could have kept all of it behind a publicist-approved smile. Instead, she kept choosing to tell the truth about the addiction, the depression, the custody decision that broke her heart to make, the grief for her brother, because she believed someone else, somewhere, needed to hear that they weren't alone in it and that our lives are hard and it was better to be honest and try and help others with her pain. That takes a specific kind of courage, and she never ran out of it.

Regular readers of this newsletter will know my thoughts on child stardom and how detrimental this can be for even the most robust personality. More information about what happened will come out, and when it does, we'll report it. But for now, that's not the story we want to tell. The story is a kid who started acting before she could tie her own shoes and never lost the drive; a young woman who paddled into a cove in Japan because she thought whales and dolphins deserved better; and an adult who stood in front of cameras and didn't hide the true, ugly, hard things so that someone else struggling in silence might feel less alone. Just months ago, she told the world she felt like she had a lot more life to live. That's the version of her we're choosing to remember today, the force of nature her father described, still reaching for what came next.

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance use, the SAMHSA National Helpline is available at 1-800-662-4357. Postpartum Support International's helpline is available at 1-800-944-4773.