The actor Hayden Panettiere, who has died suddenly aged 36, won worldwide fame at the age of 17 as the Texas high-school cheerleader Claire Bennet, one of the ordinary people with superhuman powers in the comic-book-style TV series Heroes.
Her character has the gift of rapid cellular regeneration – being able to heal in seconds from injuries such as wounds, broken bones and burns. “Think Wolverine from the X-Men – minus the claw,” wrote one critic.
Although the programme featured an ensemble cast, Claire was pivotal to the first series, broadcast in 2006. The story begins with Hiro Nakamura (played by Masi Oka) travelling from the future to tell Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia) that ensuring her survival is critical to the future of humankind. “Save the cheerleader, save the world,” he tells him. As the mystery unravels, it emerges that Hiro fears a nuclear explosion.
Heroes was soon being described in the US as television’s “coolest” new show. Over the four series (2006-10), once Claire discovers her newfound indestructibility, she helps others simply through being able to reach them, plunging into fires or jumping from heights, and transferring her powers through her blood to injured people.
“I love how she’s a normal girl,” Panettiere said. “I think she’s sassy and I think she’s a spitfire and she’s really smart. And I think that’s one of the reasons they sort of made her a cheerleader – to give her that very human look.”
After Heroes, she appeared in Scream 4 (2011), the fourth instalment in the slasher movie series. As the high-school senior and horror film fan Kirby Reed, she is a target of the copycat serial killer in the Ghostface mask, but uses her film knowledge to anticipate events. Eventually, though, she comes face to face with the killer and is stabbed, with her fate left ambiguous. This allowed her to return in Scream VI (2023) as an FBI agent investigating the latest Ghostface murders.
Panettiere’s other well-known role came in the TV series Nashville (2012-18) as Juliette Barnes, a rising singer looking to take over from the now fading Rayna Jaymes (Connie Britton) as the “queen of country music”. Juliette’s hard exterior as a demanding, arrogant diva hides her demons and pain, coming from a dysfunctional family with a drug-addicted mother, and having no friends to turn to. Under pressure, she resorts to drink and drugs, affecting her abilities as a mother after giving birth to her daughter, Cadence, and her mental health.
Panettiere later said she could relate to the character because of her own struggles with opioids and alcohol addiction, and her postnatal depression. In 2022 she told People magazine that she had spent eight months in rehab over the previous year.
“I was on top of the world and I ruined it,” she said, adding that her troubles began at 15 when she would be given “happy pills” to make her “peppy during interviews” on red carpets. “Things kept getting out of control and, as I got older, the drugs and alcohol became something I almost couldn’t live without.”
She had previously spoken about experiencing depression following the birth of her daughter, Kaya, in 2014, then splitting up with the father, Wladimir Klitschko, the Ukrainian world heavyweight boxing champion, and giving up full custody of the girl to him four years later. This came after becoming dependent on prescription pills in rehab.
In her 2026 memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, she wrote: “The fact that I wasn’t with Kaya, was officially an addict, and no longer had the will to work was killing me. I’d done this all to myself and it filled me with disgust.” Nevertheless, she set her career back on course from 2023.
Born in the Rockland County hamlet of Palisades, north of New York, Hayden was the daughter of Lesley Vogel, an actor, and Skip (Alan) Panettiere, a firefighter. At the behest of her mother, she first appeared on screen at 11 months old in a commercial for a Playskool toy, then at four made her acting debut as Sarah Roberts in the daytime soap One Life to Live (1994-97).
Switching to the US’s longest-running soap, The Guiding Light, Panettiere played Lizzie Spaulding (1996-2000) and received a special award from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society for her portrayal of going through illness. Of her character’s trials and tribulations, Panettiere recalled: “I was kidnapped, I had cancer, I was thrown down a well, I was in a car accident, the cancer came back and then it went away again. I was all but killed.”
During this time, she also voiced the ant Dot, Princess Atta’s little sister, in the Disney-Pixar animated comedy film A Bug’s Life (1998). In Remember the Titans (2000), she played the daughter of a white football coach (Will Patton) whose place is taken by a black one (Denzel Washington) as black and white schools are integrated.
Then, she appeared in the final series of the television legal drama Ally McBeal (2002) as Maddie Harrington, the biological daughter tracking down her mother, an event that changes the life of the Boston attorney played by Calista Flockhart. A string of TV guest roles followed, including on-off appearances in the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle (from 2003 to 2005) as the scheming teenager Jessica, adept at manipulating the child genius acted by Frankie Muniz; he also voiced the zebra in the family comedy film Racing Stripes (2005), in which Panettiere played Chan Walsh, the teenager who helps him to become a racehorse.
In the Disney Channel film Tiger Cruise (2004), she starred as the Navy “brat” joining her father (Bill Pulman) on board his aircraft carrier, the USS Constellation.
She played another cheerleader, taking the title role in the romcom film I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009), and, more dramatically, the convicted killer (later acquitted) in the TV movie Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy (2011).
In the thriller Sleepwalker, released at the start of this year, she starred as a grieving mother.
Panetierre is survived by her parents and daughter. Her brother, Jansen, an actor, died in 2023 of a heart problem aged 28.
• Hayden Lesley Panettiere, actor, born 21 August 1989; died 16 August 2026
