Hayden Panettiere, ‘Heroes,’ ‘Nashville’ and ‘Scream’ Star, Dies at 36

Hayden Panettiere, the actress and singer best known for playing rising country star Juliette Barnes on the musical drama Nashville, has died, her representative confirmed to ABC News. She was 36. A cause of death was not immediately known.

“It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden,” her father, Skip Panettiere, 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.” He asked for privacy “as our family takes time to process this unimaginable loss.”

Though she built her career primarily as an actress, Panettiere had a significant musical footprint through Nashville, in which she starred from 2012 to 2018 as the ambitious country-pop star Juliette Barnes opposite Connie Britton. Her performances anchored the show’s companion soundtrack series, released through Big Machine Records, which became a consistent presence on Billboard’s charts.

The debut soundtrack, The Music of Nashville: Season 1, Volume 1, debuted at No. 14 on the Billboard 200 and No. 4 on Top Country Albums in 2012, selling 56,000 copies in its first week, and the series’ installments regularly reached the upper tiers of the country and soundtrack charts across the show’s run. Her recordings as Juliette Barnes — including “Telescope,” “Don’t Put Dirt on My Grave Just Yet” and duets such as “Wrong Song” — earned her a following among country listeners, and she twice received Golden Globe nominations for the role.

Panettiere’s music predated the series. As a teenager, she recorded songs for family films and teen-pop compilations, and after being cast as Claire Bennet on the NBC superhero series Heroes, she signed with Hollywood Records and released the 2008 single “Wake Up Call.”

Born in Palisades, New York, in 1989, Panettiere began acting as a child, appearing in Ally McBeal, Remember the Titans and Message in a Bottle, and voicing a character in Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, before her breakout role on Heroes in 2006. Her later credits included Scream 4 and Scream VI, I Love You, Beth Cooper and the TV movie Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy.

Panettiere was candid about the pressures of a life in the public eye from childhood onward. In May, she released a memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, and spoke publicly about her experiences with fame, motherhood and mental health, including postpartum depression — a subject she said she was moved to discuss after realizing “how many people needed to hear it.”

She shared a daughter, Kaya, with former heavyweight boxing champion Wladimir Klitschko, with whom she had an on-and-off relationship over nine years before the couple separated in 2018. Her death comes a little more than two years after that of her younger brother, actor Jansen Panettiere, who died in February 2023 at 28.