Hayden Panettiere, the actress who played Claire Bennet on Heroes and voiced Kairi across the Kingdom Hearts games, has died at 36.
Her representative confirmed the death to multiple outlets, including ABC News and CBS News. Her father, Skip Panettiere, released a statement through that representative.
“It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden,” the statement read, describing her as “an incredible light and a force of nature” and asking for privacy while the family processes the loss.
No Cause Of Death Has Been Released
Details surrounding the death have not been made public.
Police in Greenville, South Carolina said a preliminary investigation turned up no signs of foul play or suspicious circumstances.
Anything beyond that is speculation at this point, and there is a lot of it circulating. We will update this post when the family or authorities say more.
Save The Cheerleader
For a certain generation of comic book TV fans, Panettiere is Claire Bennet and nothing else needs saying.
Heroes premiered on NBC in 2006, a full two years before Iron Man rewired the movie business, and it was the first American network drama in a long while to treat superpowers as a serious dramatic engine rather than a costume gag. Claire was the show’s emotional center. The indestructible cheerleader who could not be killed and desperately wanted to be normal.
“Save the cheerleader, save the world” became the tagline that carried the first season, and it worked because Panettiere sold the fear underneath the invulnerability. She was 17 when the show launched. She carried a network tentpole through four seasons.
Plenty of the superhero television that followed owes Heroes more than it admits.
Kairi, Xion And Until Dawn
Her gaming footprint is bigger than most obituaries are going to account for.
Panettiere originated Kairi in the English dub of Kingdom Hearts in 2002 and returned for Kingdom Hearts II and Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep.
She also voiced Xion in Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance. Alyson Stoner took the Kairi role for several entries in between, but the voice players heard first was hers.
She also played Samantha Giddings in Supermassive’s Until Dawn, one of the defining performance capture horror games of the PS4 era, and reprised Sam in a post-credits scene for the 2024 remake.
Scream, Pixar And A Career That Started Before She Could Walk
Genre fans also knew her as Kirby Reed, the horror savvy survivor of Scream 4 who came back more than a decade later in Scream VI.
Kirby was one of the few characters in that franchise the audience actively campaigned to bring back, and Wes Craven’s film gave her some of its sharpest material.
Her feature debut was Pixar.
She voiced Princess Dot in A Bug’s Life in 1998 at age nine, then Suri in Disney’s Dinosaur.
She appeared in a commercial at 11 months old and worked steadily from there, including soap runs on One Life to Live and Guiding Light, plus Remember the Titans, Ice Princess and Bring It On: All or Nothing.
Her two Golden Globe nominations came for Nashville, where she played country star Juliette Barnes from 2012 to 2018.
She Spent Her Last Months Telling Her Own Story
In May, Panettiere published a memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, covering her childhood in the industry, physical abuse, addiction and recovery. She promoted it in an extended sit down with Gayle King at CBS News.
In that interview she described being taken into audition rooms as an eight month old and hitting 50 commercials by age five, and said the only opinion that registered was her mother’s.
She lost her younger brother, actor Jansen Panettiere, in 2023. She is survived by her daughter, Kaya.
She was 36 years old. Her birthday would have been this Friday.
