Hayden Panettiere death from cardiac arrest was confirmed on Monday by her representative, who told Business Insider that the actor was 36 years old. Her father, Skip Panettiere, issued a statement on behalf of the family: ‘It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden. 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.’
The statement continued: ‘We ask for privacy as our family takes time to process this unimaginable loss.’
What the Greenville County Coroner’s Office confirmed
At approximately 1:51 pm on Sunday, a 911 call was received regarding a cardiac arrest at Judson Mill Lofts, an apartment complex in Greenville County, South Carolina. The Greenville County Coroner’s Office told Business Insider that first responders found Panettiere in cardiac arrest on arrival. Resuscitation efforts were unsuccessful, and she was pronounced dead at 2:32 pm.
An autopsy was performed and showed no sign of trauma that would have contributed to her death, according to the coroner’s office.
A career that began in childhood
Panettiere began her acting career as a child, with one of her earliest major roles as Sarah Roberts on the ABC soap opera ‘One Life to Live,’ on which she appeared from 1994 to 1997. She later became widely known for playing Claire Bennet in ‘Heroes’ and Juliette Barnes in the musical drama ‘Nashville,’ in which she starred from 2012 to 2018.
The overlap between her personal life and her ‘Nashville’ character became a recurring subject in her later interviews. In a May appearance on Jay Shetty’s ‘On Purpose’ podcast, Panettiere reflected on how closely her character’s storylines mirrored her own experiences. ‘It felt like it never ended. I didn’t know where Juliet began, and Hayden ended,’ she told Shetty. She said she initially thought the parallels were a ‘coincidence,’ but eventually felt she was living through her experiences twice. ‘I couldn’t come up for air from it. There was no break from it,’ she said.
Hayden Panettiere death and a life marked by personal struggle
In her memoir, released on 19 May, Panettiere wrote openly about her struggles with postpartum depression after giving birth to her daughter in 2014. Her account was candid about the severity of what she experienced.
‘It wasn’t panic that was sitting in my chest. It was nothing. A total blackout of emotion, like my soul was dead,’ she wrote. To manage her symptoms, she described turning to alcohol: ‘The first thing I’d thought of when I woke up was alcohol. Not my child, not my job, and not the rest of my life. I needed a drink to function, at 6 a.m.’
She described using alcohol as a way to access ‘those happy hormones,’ as she put it. The candour of those passages was a measure of how thoroughly the memoir engaged with the period she endured during and after filming ‘Nashville.’
In 2018, Panettiere signed over full custody of her daughter to Wladimir Klitschko, saying she believed the arrangement was best for her daughter. That same year marked the end of her run on ‘Nashville,’ a coincidence of timing that she did not publicly comment on directly, though the podcast appearance made plain how intertwined the two threads of her life had become.
She was 36. The Greenville County Coroner’s Office has confirmed its findings, and an official cause of death beyond the cardiac arrest had not been further specified in the coroner’s statement to Business Insider.