Hayden Panettiere, the former child actress who grew up onscreen before our very eyes, passed away Sunday at the age of 36. She died five days before her 37th birthday.
“It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden,” her father Alan said in a statement. “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.”
While we are still awaiting a cause of death, Panettiere, who delivered her breakthrough performance at the age of 10 in “Remember the Titans” before starring in the NBC superhero saga “Heroes,” as fan favorite Kirby Reed in the “Scream” films and Juliette Barnes in the country music drama “Nashville,” had struggled for years battling drug addiction, alcoholism and depression, and suffered mightily at the hands of Hollywood. Panettiere chronicled her Hollywood highs and lows in her eye-opening memoir, “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” released May 19 of this year.
In the prologue to her book, she mentions the five stages of grief — and her belief in a sixth, floated by the author David Kessler in his book “Finding Meaning.” That stage is meaning, and Panettiere wrote that “my traumas have offered me meaning through a sense of humor, some ridiculous stories, prioritizing my health, a deeper relationship with my parents, pets I adore, animal rights and environmentalism that gives me purpose, and now, this book.”
She continued: “All the heartaches I’ve endured have allowed me to come to a place of empathy and understanding for everything my loved ones have come up against and — most importantly — for myself. They’ve also given me determination. I’m like Dory, the resilient little fish in ‘Finding Nemo,’ who ‘just keeps swimming’ even when she comes face-to-face with a bunch of sharks.”
Raised in Palisades, New York, Panettiere landed a series of commercials — the first at only eleven months old — before landing a role in the soap opera “One Life to Live” at the age of five. She described herself as a “willful child” who wouldn’t be bossed around; a “tomboy” with a big head of curly hair and a “spunky, sassy attitude.” There are plenty of bright moments in her book, like the time she tossed a football around with Denzel Washington on the set of “Remember the Titans” — a movie-making experience she called “the happiest I’d ever felt as an actor” — and disappointing ones, such as losing a role in “Panic Room” to Kristen Stewart after Nicole Kidman had backed out of the film due to injury. She shared intimate details about her family life, like the time her mom discovered her father was having an affair and the destructive impact it had on their family dynamic; her complicated relationship with her stage mom-mother, a former soap opera actress; and being overcome with grief after losing her beloved brother and confidant, Jansen, to heart complications in 2023.
But the moments from “This Is Me: A Reckoning” that stuck with me the most concerned the many ways she was targeted by Hollywood predators.
There was the “important executive at NBC” who kissed her on the lips at a party in 2008 while she starred on his network’s hit show “Heroes,” or the time that a star-studded apartment party in Los Feliz took a turn for the appalling when an “Oscar-winning actor and director” cornered a 19-year-old Panettiere as she was about to leave and tricked her into staring at his exposed testicles with the line, “There’s a big wad of gum on my pants.”
“I looked down and recoiled,” she recalled in the book. “This well-respected, award-winning actor’s testicles were hanging out from his unzipped fly… Up to that moment, men in Hollywood had always been kind and respectful around me. There may have been a peck on the lips here and an inappropriate comment there, but nothing had crossed a line.”
And that line kept getting crossed, again and again. One of the most shocking incidents occurred when Panettiere was 18 and an actress-friend, who she calls Stella in the book, invited her to a yacht party in the South of France. Stella ushered her down into the bowels of the ship and to a cabin where a “famous thirtysomething British singer-songwriter” lay naked in bed, his bottom half covered in sheets.
“I want you to get in bed with him. He has a huge dick,” Stella told Panettiere, who subsequently panicked, writing, “My thoughts were a blur, but I’d spent my life trusting that others had my best interests at heart. Being ‘managed’ was routine, to the point where I lost faith in my intuition. I could feel my heart pounding. As I settled in underneath the sheets, I disassociated. My body no longer felt like my own.” Then, her “survival instinct kicked in” and she managed to escape before anything happened.
The Hollywood crowd proved so off-putting to Panettiere that she found herself drawn to the former heavyweight champion boxer Wladimir Klitschko, who is currently helping defend his country of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, because of how un-Hollywood he is. The two share a daughter, Kaya.
As Panettiere told People, when she was only 15, someone on her team began plying her with “happy pills” before she walked red carpets. “They were to make me peppy during interviews,” Panettiere said. “I had no idea that this was not an appropriate thing, or what door that would open for me when it came to my addiction… As I got older, the drugs and alcohol became something I almost couldn’t live without.”
Her battle with drugs, alcohol and depression led to an eight-month rehab stint in 2020, where she wrote candidly about the painful effects of withdrawal on her body and mind.
“As my nervous system tried to regulate itself without the depressant effects of alcohol, it went into overdrive, and my whole body shook, I couldn’t sleep, and my head pounded like it was pressing against my skull… A doctor told me that if I didn’t stop drinking, I’d be dead within five years,” she recalled in her book.
Whatever her cause of death is, one thing is certain: Hollywood failed to protect Hayden Panettiere. Hopefully, her death will serve as a reminder to the industry’s powers that be that young girls and women need to be heard, need to feel safe, and need to be shielded from its more sordid characters.
I’ll leave you with a portion of the final chapter of Panettiere’s memoir, which she named “One Final Thought”:
“Radical acceptance has taught me to walk hand in hand with my triumphs and my tragedies because they’ve made me who I am. And today, I really love that person. If there’s anything I can offer you with this book, it’s my hope that you do the same.”
