Hayden Panettiere, who has died at the age of 36, lived most of her life in the spotlight – from success as a child star to lead roles in hit TV shows Heroes and Nashville – but also endured struggles that went along with the pressures of fame.
Panettiere appeared in her first commercial when she was 11 months old. Her mother Lesley Vogel was an actress and set her daughter on the same path.
By the age of four, Hayden was in US TV show One Life to Live, then at eight joined another soap opera, Guiding Light.
Her natural acting ability was evident, but the burgeoning childhood career came at a cost.
“From a very young age, I lost the chance to have a normal childhood, friends, relationships, and my privacy,” Panettiere wrote in her revealing autobiography, This Is Me, which was published earlier this year.
She was “groomed” to be an actor, she told the Hollywood Reporter. “I was like a little soldier and I always have been. No was never an option.”
Panettiere’s career flourished and she soon earned roles like the voice of Princess Dot in Pixar’s A Bug’s Life in 1998, becoming one of the youngest ever Grammy Award nominees for the accompanying children’s read-along album.
She starred with Denzel Washington in American football drama Remember the Titans in 2000, and had roles in TV’s Ally McBeal and 2004’s Raising Helen with Kate Hudson.
When filming 2005’s Racing Stripes, a children’s film about a zebra who thinks it’s a race horse, she suffered a back injury when she fell off a zebra, and “over 20 years later, these injuries still bother me”, she wrote.
She also starred in 2006 cheerleading comedy Bring It On: All or Nothing, the third instalment in the Bring It On film series.
Also in 2006, she achieved a new level of fame when mysterious TV drama Heroes became a major hit.
Panettiere gave a likeably sparky performance as Claire, a cheerleader who regenerated if she was physically harmed, and who was at the heart of the show’s “save the cheerleader, save the world” plot.
The actress was 17 when it launched and the fame came with new levels of attention, including from swarms of paparazzi. They kicked her and said “appalling” things to attempt to get a reaction, she said, while one headline trumpeted a picture of her apparent cellulite.
“I suffered from body dysmorphia for years because of that, believing that no matter how strong, thin or young I was, there was no escaping the dreaded cottage cheese thighs.”
Watch: Hayden Panettiere on her career and growing up in the spotlight
At one point, she was given a “happy pill” by a publicist to help her perform on a red carpet. That ended up being “the gateway drug that ushered me toward the good of pharmaceuticals and the downfall of addiction”, she said.
While working on Heroes, Panettiere suggested her mother should no longer be her manager. “I desperately wanted her to just be my mom,” the actress said.
“I also wasn’t expecting the reaction that I got, which was, ‘You owe me.’ That’s all she said, and she walked out.”
During her career in Hollywood, Panettiere was also subjected to sexual harassment.
At a party in 2008, a TV executive kissed her on the lips. She initially brushed the incident off as harmless, but Milo Ventimiglia, her Heroes co-star who she started dating when she was 18, told her it was “completely inappropriate”.
Later, a man who she described as “an Oscar-winning actor and director” allegedly exposed himself to her. She said he told her he had gum on his trousers – and when she looked down, “this well-respected, award-winning actor’s testicles were hanging out from his unzipped fly”.
And another time, someone she thought of as a friend ushered her into bed with a naked, unnamed “famous thirtysomething British singer-songwriter” while on a yacht.
“My body no longer felt like my own,” Panettiere wrote. “The shock was so great it didn’t even occur to me to say no.” She did, however, manage to get out of the bed and run out of the room.
Panettiere met Ukrainian boxing champion Wladimir Klitschko at a party in Los Angeles when she was 19 and they began a relationship. He was 13 years older than her, and they had a daughter five years later.
After the birth, she was hit hard by postpartum depression. “I never felt any hostility or negativity toward my child, thankfully, but I wasn’t connecting with her the way that I knew I should be, and I was full of stress and anxiety all the time,” she told podcaster Jay Shetty.
She was drinking heavily. “What I was doing to suppress those emotions was not normal and it was not healthy.”
