Hayden Panettiere, best known for her roles in Heroes, Nashville, and the Scream franchise, has died at 36. First responders arrived at a Greenville, South Carolina residence on Sunday after a 911 call reporting cardiac arrest, finding Panettiere unresponsive. Resuscitation efforts were unsuccessful, and she was pronounced dead at 2:32 PM.
The official cause of death remains under investigation. An autopsy completed the following day found no signs of trauma contributing to her death, though emergency dispatch communications referenced a possible overdose, a detail authorities have not confirmed as the cause.
Panettiere's career began before she was a year old, and she spent much of her life in the public eye. Her role as cheerleader Claire Bennet in NBC's Heroes made her a household name, with her popularity helping keep the original cast through all four seasons despite the show's initial plans to rotate new characters each year. She later earned award nominations for her work on Nashville.
In recent years, Panettiere had been open about her battles with addiction and postpartum depression, which led her to give up custody of her daughter Kaya, whom she shares with former fiancé Wladimir Klitschko, in 2018. This year she published a memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, addressing her struggles and her grief over losing her younger brother Jansen, who died in 2023 at age 28 from an undiagnosed heart condition.
Her father Alan released a statement calling her "an incredible light and a force of nature who brought immeasurable love and joy to all who knew her." She was five days away from her 37th birthday.
