Hayden Panettiere, the actress who became a household name playing indestructible cheerleader Claire Bennet on “Heroes” and country star Juliette Barnes on “Nashville,” has died at 36. She was found unresponsive in cardiac arrest at a residence in Greenville, South Carolina, on Sunday, where she had reportedly been staying temporarily.
First responders arrived and began advanced cardiac life support measures. Despite those efforts, Panettiere was pronounced dead at 2:32 p.m. She would have turned 37 this coming Friday.
An autopsy was completed Monday. The Greenville County Coroner’s Office said no signs of trauma were discovered that would have contributed to her death, but the cause and manner of death remain pending further investigation, with the Coroner’s Office and Greenville City Police Department continuing to examine the circumstances. Sanewords will update this story if and when an official cause is released — we’re not going to guess in the meantime.
What her family said
Panettiere’s father, Skip Panettiere, shared a statement on behalf of the family: “It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden. 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.” The family asked for privacy as they grieve.
It’s a loss the Panettiere family has weathered before. Hayden’s younger brother, actor Jansen Panettiere, died in February 2023 at age 28 from cardiomegaly and aortic valve complications.
A career that started before she could drive
Panettiere had been working since childhood, but she broke out nationally in 2006 on NBC’s “Heroes,” playing a small-town teenager who discovers she’s practically indestructible — a role that made her, briefly, one of the most recognizable young actresses on television. She carried that momentum into film with “Remember the Titans,” “Raising Helen,” “Ice Princess,” and the horror franchise “Scream,” appearing in both “Scream 4” and the 2023 “Scream” reboot.
In 2012, she took on Juliette Barnes, a manipulative but magnetic young country star, on ABC’s “Nashville” — a role that ran for the show’s full six-season run and let her sing many of her own vocals. It’s arguably the performance most associated with her adult career, and one that showed a rawer, more complicated register than the “Heroes” years had asked of her.
Talking openly about what came after
Off-screen, Panettiere spent the last several years being unusually candid about struggles that don’t usually make it into a press tour. In May 2026, she released a memoir, “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” addressing postpartum depression, addiction, recovery, trauma, and domestic abuse. She was mother to a daughter, Kaya Klitschko, born in 2014 with her ex-fiancé, former heavyweight boxing champion Wladimir Klitschko.
That willingness to speak plainly about mental health and addiction is a thread running through how colleagues have remembered her this week.
How Hollywood is remembering her
Tributes came quickly from people who’d worked alongside her for decades. Sendhil Ramamurthy, her “Heroes” co-star, wrote on Instagram: “This is such a rough one… I saw this beautiful Phoenix rising from the ashes. Your tests became your testimony, and your testimony became your legacy.” Fellow “Heroes” cast member Dania Ramirez reflected on the energy and warmth Panettiere brought to people around her, and “Heroes” writer Bryan Fuller called her a muse, writing that she was “wise beyond her years and already saddled with so much of a life,” and that she’d “left an indelible mark on me as a writer and a storyteller.”
From the “Nashville” side, a co-star recalled how “she had this way of making you feel at home. From the moment I walked onto the Nashville set, she made me feel like I belonged.” Bethany Joy Lenz, who knew Panettiere going back to “Guiding Light” in the late 1990s, wrote simply: “I’m crushed,” describing a memory of a young Panettiere “running through the hallways of the studio… laughing and playing games in between blocking and camera rehearsals.”
Actress Viola Davis, who wasn’t a regular co-star but crossed paths with her in the industry, called Panettiere “an old, wise soul with such a deep heart,” adding, “I wish the world had more time with you because I had a burning curiosity about who you were becoming.”
What we don’t know yet
Investigators haven’t released a cause of death, and Sanewords isn’t going to speculate on one. What’s documented is a young actress who spent three decades in the public eye — first as a kid actor, then as one of the faces of a hit superhero drama, then as a country-music lead, and more recently as someone willing to write candidly about the harder parts of getting there. Her family has asked for space to grieve; her collaborators, this week, have mostly just been trying to say what she meant to them.
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