NBC’s “Heroes” made Hayden Panettiere a household name by making us believe she was unstoppable. Not her, of course, but Claire Bennet — the Odessa, Texas high school cheerleader who couldn’t be killed.
In the series premiere, Claire throws herself off an oil derrick’s rusty platform, plummeting at least 70 or 80 feet in a fall that should have broken her body. Instead, she stands up, pops her dislocated shoulder back into its socket and grimly declares to the shocked classmate filming her, “This is Claire Bennet, and that was attempt No. 6.” Later, in that same episode, she runs into a burning building to rescue a man trapped inside. He suffers horrible burns, but she dashes away unscathed.
Claire wears her cheerleader uniform in both scenes — the identifying outfit that generated the first season’s catchphrase, “Save the cheerleader, save the world.”
There are so many dark stories about child stars that make us wonder what might have been, if only. Panettiere, who died on Sunday at 36, lived one of them. She rocketed to stardom with starring roles on “Heroes” and “Nashville,” where she played up-and-coming country star Juliette Barnes opposite Connie Britton.
Both productions also transgressed personal boundaries that pushed Panettiere to lows no one should endure, but so many stars growing up in the spotlight unfortunately do. During her time on “Heroes,” she wrote in her recently published memoir “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” someone in her orbit began slipping her pharmaceuticals to amp up her energy for public appearances.
Later, the writers on “Nashville” mined Panettiere’s private battles for her character’s storylines: Her postpartum depression and struggles with substance dependency began turning up in scripts. Since she was raised to be a good soldier, she took it all in stride. Privately, Panettiere spent time in and out of rehab to treat her addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs.
When emergency responders in Greenville, S.C., found Panettiere in an apartment on Sunday, she was unresponsive and in cardiac arrest. An anonymous source told The New York Times that the cause was an apparent drug overdose.
It is easy to regard a former child star’s troubles as an inevitability of the profession. From the looks of where Panettiere was steering her life, it didn’t have to be. Yes, she grew up in front of TV cameras, landing her first regular roles on soap operas, including ABC’s “One Life to Live” and CBS’ “Guiding Light.” Four seasons on “Heroes” launched her to a level of celebrity few child actors achieve.
There are so many dark stories about child stars that make us wonder what might have been, if only. Panettiere, who died on Sunday at 36, lived one of them.
But she also defied the industry tendency to pigeonhole performers based on the breakout success of characters like Claire Bennet. Panettiere’s high school hero emerged on TV during the “sheroes” era of the aughts, arriving in the wake of Sydney Bristow on “Alias” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” another cheerleader turned supernatural brawler.
But where Jennifer Garner and Sarah Michelle Gellar struggled to shake the action-hero personas that made them stars, Panettiere followed “Heroes” with ABC’s “Nashville,” a series created by “Thelma & Louise” writer Callie Khouri that showcased the full range of her acting ability. Playing Juliette earned Panettiere two Golden Globe nominations, and her performances of the character’s songs landed her on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs charts 11 times.
What we saw onscreen, along with the catchy music she made, was, in her telling, the fruit of a creative yield achieved by pressing beyond her breaking point.
In “This Is Me,” she describes spending time in and out of rehab, losing custody of her child and rebuilding her life to a place that, as of this year, included plans to produce and direct new projects, as she mentioned in a recent New York Times profile.
“This is Me” also depicts her mother, former soap actress Lesley Vogel, as demanding her daughter’s absolute best at every step in her career and leaving her with no alternative path. Panettiere’s first national TV gig came at 11 months old with a Playskool toy train commercial, the start of around 50 advertising appearances she’d rack up before she was 5 years old.
Her feature film debut came in 1998, when she voiced Princess Dot in “A Bug’s Life.” She was 9. After that, she became one of the youngest Grammy nominees ever in the best spoken word album for children category thanks to her voice work on “A Bug’s Life Read-Along.”
As Panettiere told Jay Shetty on a May episode of his podcast “On Purpose,” those early achievements came at the cost of enjoying a normal childhood. By the time she was 11, she’d already acted alongside Denzel Washington in “Remember the Titans,” which led her teachers and classmates to treat her differently. Vogel bought an apartment for her daughter when she was 16, Panettiere recalled, and the whole family lived in it. She parted ways with Vogel professionally when she was 19.
Her father, Alan “Skip” Panettiere, worked for New York City’s fire department and was the parent she leaned on for emotional support. “That has kind of continued in my life,” she told Shetty, “just wanting to know that if I found myself in a terrible position, that I could call somebody to help me. I could rely on somebody . . . I wasn’t the person that everybody else was relying on, and therefore nobody was there for me.”
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Panettiere was 17 when “Heroes” became a breakout hit and made her and co-stars Milo Ventimiglia, Masi Oka and Zachary Quinto sought-after talents. But she was the one that the paparazzi hounded most fiercely, feeding malicious tabloid coverage focused on her body image and weight.
The news that she was dating Ventimiglia kicked the frenzy into overdrive, especially since he was 30 years old at the time while she was 18.
Not long ago, she told The Messenger that, overall, she looks back on her career with a sense of curiosity. “Because [‘Nashville’] took six years of my career when I was at my physical prime, my mental, my everything, I just wonder what it would have been like in the hiatuses, [if I] did one project or film, or was encouraged to do that,” she remarked. “Where would I be today?”
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