She played a country star for six seasons. What most people forget is that she actually became one.
Hayden Panettiere has died at the age of 36. Her father, Skip Panettiere, confirmed the news to ABC News on Sunday in a statement released through her representative.
“It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden,” the statement read. “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.”
He asked for privacy “as our family takes time to process this unimaginable loss.”
The cause and manner of her death have not been released. Her publicist, Kasey Kitchen, told NBC News there is an ongoing investigation and that more information is expected soon.
She Didn’t Just Play a Country Singer. She Made Real Country Records.
For six seasons on “Nashville,” Panettiere played Juliette Barnes, the ambitious young star clawing her way up the Music Row ladder while colliding with Connie Britton’s Rayna Jaymes. It was a role that could have been a caricature. Panettiere made it something more complicated and more human.
But here’s the part that gets lost. She sang every note herself.
Her recordings as Juliette Barnes came out on Big Machine Records, the same Nashville label that launched Taylor Swift. “Undermine,” her duet with Charles Esten, was co-written by Kacey Musgraves before most of the country knew who Kacey Musgraves was. “Telescope” went to country radio as a legitimate single in October 2012, produced by Dann Huff and written by Hillary Lindsey and Cary Barlowe, two of the most respected songwriters in town.
The Music of Nashville: Season 1, Volume 1 debuted at No. 4 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart and No. 14 on the Billboard 200. It sold 56,000 copies in its first week and moved another 198,000 across 2013, making it the sixth best-selling soundtrack album of the year. Panettiere eventually had two full albums of her own Juliette Barnes material.
Those aren’t novelty numbers. Those are real country music numbers, earned with real vocals on real Nashville recordings.
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A Career That Started Before Most People Learn to Walk
Panettiere was born on August 21, 1989, in Palisades, New York. She started working at 11 months old in television commercials, and by four and a half, she was on the soap opera “One Life to Live.”
For You
She voiced Dot in Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life.” She played Sheryl Yoast alongside Denzel Washington in “Remember the Titans” in 2000. She broke out as cheerleader Claire Bennet on NBC’s “Heroes,” a role that made her a household name. She returned to the “Scream” franchise as Kirby Reed in both “Scream 4” and “Scream VI,” and lent her voice to the video game “Until Dawn.”
But it was “Nashville” that earned her multiple award nominations and connected her to a genre and a city that took her in as one of its own.
She Spent Her Last Years Telling the Truth
In May, Panettiere released her memoir, “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” a book she described as her story alone to tell.
“I was fiercely protective of people in my writing,” she told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of its release. “I felt very strongly about my ability to tell my stories and make them entertaining enough to put in a book, without having to drag people through the mud.”
In it, she wrote about childhood fame, motherhood, her mental health, and the loss of her younger brother, Jansen Panettiere, who died in February 2023 at 28 from cardiomegaly and aortic valve complications.
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She never got over it, and she never pretended otherwise. “I will always be heartbroken about it,” she told PEOPLE two years after his death. “I will never be able to get over it. No matter how many years go by, I will never get over his loss.”
She spoke with the same honesty about her own struggles, including a 2022 interview with Good Morning America, where she talked openly about alcoholism and postpartum depression at a time when few people in her position were willing to. That candor helped people. It’s part of what she leaves behind.
Panettiere is survived by her daughter, Kaya Evdokia Klitschko, whom she shares with former fiancé Wladimir Klitschko, along with her parents and the millions of people who grew up watching her.
Juliette Barnes was written as a woman who was tougher than the industry gave her credit for, more talented than her critics admitted, and carrying more than anyone could see from the outside. Hayden Panettiere played that part for six years.
She was 36 years old. Rest easy.
