Hayden Panettiere Dead at 36: Remembering a Star Who Helped Define an Era of Television

Hayden Panettiere has died at the age of 36. Her family confirmed her death Sunday through her publicist. No official cause of death has been announced, and the circumstances remain under investigation. She is survived by her parents and her 11-year-old daughter, Kaya.

Thirty-six years old.

I keep coming back to that, maybe because Hayden Panettiere had already been around for so long that it was easy to forget how young she actually was. She started acting as a child and had already built a career before a lot of people first really knew her name.

But for me, that name will always be connected to Heroes. When Heroes premiered in 2006, it was a defining show. Television was changing, superhero stories hadn't yet become the constant presence they would eventually become, and suddenly there was this huge serialized story about ordinary people discovering that they could do extraordinary things. I watched every episode, and right at the center of it was Hayden Panettiere as Claire Bennet.

The cheerleader who couldn't die became one of the faces of the entire series. “Save the cheerleader, save the world” wasn't just a line from the show. For a while, it was everywhere. Claire could heal from almost anything. She could survive injuries that would kill anyone else. There is something almost cruel about seeing that character become so closely associated with an actress whose life has now ended so impossibly young.

Panettiere had already been working for years before Heroes. She appeared on television as a child, voiced Dot in Pixar's A Bug's Life and appeared in Remember the Titans. But Claire Bennet changed the scale of her career. Heroes premiered in September 2006 and made her one of the most recognizable young actors on television.

She later spent six seasons playing Juliette Barnes on Nashville, a performance that earned her two Golden Globe nominations. She also found another character audiences refused to forget in Kirby Reed, first appearing in Scream 4 in 2011 before returning more than a decade later in Scream VI.

Her career was only part of her story. Panettiere had also spoken publicly about some of the most difficult periods of her life, including postpartum depression and addiction. Earlier this year, she addressed the painful decision she had made years ago for her daughter Kaya to live with her father, former heavyweight boxing champion Wladimir Klitschko, while Panettiere sought treatment.

She rejected the idea that she had abandoned her daughter. She described their relationship as close and spoke openly about how difficult that decision had been and how important it was to her that Kaya knew she was loved.

She had a daughter.

Kaya is 11 years old, and that is the part of this I can't get past. There are plenty of ways to talk about losing an actor. We can talk about the performances that stay behind, the movies and shows we can revisit and the strange permanence that comes with having someone's work preserved on a screen. But there is an 11-year-old girl who just lost her mother. I can't think of much worse than that.

Hayden Panettiere spent most of her life in front of us. Some people first saw her as a child actress. Some knew her as Juliette Barnes. Horror fans knew her as Kirby Reed. I'll always see Claire Bennet.

I'll remember sitting down every week to watch Heroes, back when you actually had to wait another seven days to find out what happened next. I'll remember how big that show felt when it arrived and how completely I bought into that world, and I'll remember the young actress who stood at the center of it.

Hayden Panettiere was 36 years old. She should have had so much more time.