Hayden Panettiere, best known for her roles in Heroes, Nashville, and the Scream franchise, has died aged 36.
“It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden,” Panettiere’s father, Skip said in a statement to ABC News. “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.”
No cause of death was announced, and her publicist Kasey Kitchen told NBC News that her death was being investigated.
The Independent has reached out to her representatives for comment.
Panettiere was born on 21 August 1989 in Palisades, New York, to actress Lesley Vogel and fire department captain Skip Panettiere. She began appearing in commercials at 11 months old and went on to work as a child actor on One Life to Live and Guiding Light.
Panettiere became one of the most recognisable young actors on American television after being cast as cheerleader Claire Bennet in the NBC superhero drama Heroes, which ran from 2006 to 2010. She later played country singer Juliette Barnes in Nashville, a role that earned her two Golden Globe nominations.
She was also known for playing Kirby Reed in the Scream franchise, where she first appeared in 2011’s Scream 4. She went on to reprise the role in 2023’s Scream VI, marking her return to acting after a four-year break.
Other film roles included appearances in Remember the Titans, Raising Helen, Ice Princess and I Love You, Beth Cooper, as well as the television film Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy.
In May this year, Panettiere spoke to The Independent on how being a child star affected her, saying: “It’s not healthy to receive so much praise as a child.”
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
“When I got to an age where I became somebody the paparazzi were interested in, and the media wanted all the gory details… it broke my heart that people thought negatively about me,” she said.
She became a mother in December 2014, when she and former fiancé, Ukrainian heavyweight boxer Wladimir Klitschko, welcomed their daughter, Kaya. Panettiere later gave Klitschko full custody of Kaya in 2018 while she was struggling with addiction and postpartum depression. She spoke about the decision again in 2022, telling Facebook Watch’s Red Table Talk podcast that signing the papers was “the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever had to do in my life”.
“I think there’s been this very common misconception that I just gave up my child,” she said in an interview with podcaster Jay Shetty in May. “That could not be farther from the truth.”
Panettiere said Klitschko suggested their daughter live with him full-time when the child was 2, and added that she was in a “horrible cycle for years of battling depression and anxiety and alcoholism and substance abuse” while “just trying to find my way back, my way out of the darkness.”
She entered rehab in 2015, while filming Nashville. “I was the one who put myself in the first treatment center. I was drowning,” she said in a 2023 interview with Women’s Health.
In May 2026, Panettiere published her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, in which she wrote about her experiences as a child star and discussed addiction, postpartum depression, trauma, domestic abuse and motherhood. In the book, she wrote that when she lost her right front tooth at the age of eight, her mom took her to a dentist to set her up with a fake tooth.
“A nice dental assistant took a mold of my top teeth, and Dr. Bob explained to me and Mom that a flipper is a retainer with an acrylic ‘palate,’” Panettiere wrote. “However, because a flipper doesn’t straighten anything, there are no wires. Instead, stuck to the front of the palate is an artificial tooth that fits squarely where the missing tooth used to be. When I put the flipper in my mouth, no one would know I’d lost a tooth.”
Her death comes more than three years after the death of her younger brother, actor Jansen Panettiere, who died in February 2023 aged 28 from an enlarged heart. “He was my only sibling, and it was my job to protect him,” she told People magazine at the time. “When I lost him, I felt like I lost half of my soul.”
She described how she “ballooned out” after his death, gaining 40 pounds in a short period of time. “It didn’t matter what I did, what I ate. I know stress and cortisol running through your body can do that. Now I think my body was protecting itself, shielding itself from the world.”