Hayden Panettiere's screen work runs 32 years, from a 1994 soap to Sleepwalker — and two of her biggest roles were only her voice
America has been typing her name into search all day, and mostly one query behind it: what was she in. The answer runs from a soap opera in 1994 to a thriller released this January, and it takes in a cheerleader who could not be killed, a country star, and two roles that were only ever her voice.
One of the most-searched names in America tonight belongs to someone who has been dead for four weeks, and the query attached to it is not about the investigation. It is "movies and tv shows". People want the list.
Hayden Panettiere died on 16 August in Greenville, South Carolina, at 36, in cardiac arrest. The autopsy found no signs of trauma; the cause of death has not been finalised publicly. What follows is the other thing worth knowing about her — the work, which started in 1994 and did not stop.
She was a professional before she could spell the word. Panettiere played Sarah Roberts on One Life to Live from 1994 to 1997 and Lizzie Spaulding on Guiding Light from 1996 to 2000 — two daytime soaps at once, as a small child. By nine she had voiced Dot in Pixar's A Bug's Life. By eleven she was Sheryl Yoast, the coach's daughter in Remember the Titans.
A career that begins at four and ends at 36 is not a short career. It is a 32-year one that happened to belong to someone young.
The 2000s were teen studio pictures: Raising Helen, Ice Princess in 2005 opposite Michelle Trachtenberg, Bring It On: All or Nothing, I Love You, Beth Cooper. Then two roles turned her into television shorthand. Claire Bennet, the indestructible cheerleader of Heroes from 2006 to 2010, came with a catchphrase an entire network ran on. Juliette Barnes, the monstrous, wounded country star of Nashville from 2012 to 2018, brought her two Golden Globe nominations and a singing career she had not planned.
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The no-kill clause
Horror fans know her as Kirby Reed, and Kirby is the reason for one of the odder pieces of contract trivia in the genre. In Scream 4 (2011), Kirby is stabbed twice in the stomach and the camera leaves her. The fate looked terminal. It was not: Wes Craven confirmed she lived, noting that "she was still moving when we cut away from her" — and Panettiere's contract carried a no-kill clause.
It paid off twelve years later. Scream VI (2023) brought Kirby back as an FBI agent in Atlanta, shot her twice, saved her with a vest, had her stabbed by Ethan Landry, and let her kill him and walk out. Two films, four attempts, no funeral.
The roles you know without having seen her
- Kingdom Hearts, 2002–2017. She voiced Kairi and later Xion across the franchise — for a lot of players, the defining voice of the series.
- Until Dawn, 2015. Samantha Giddings, in the horror game that made the branching-choice format mainstream.
- A Bug's Life, 1998. Dot, aged nine, in the film most people never connect to her.
The last credit is recent enough to be jarring. Sleepwalker, directed by Brandon Auman and released by Brainstorm Media on 9 January this year, cast her as Sarah Pangborn, an artist working through the death of her daughter in a car crash. It came out seven months before she did.
Thirty-two years, two soaps, two Golden Globe nominations, a Saturn Award, one cheerleader, one country star and one character the studio contractually could not kill.
She had talked about writing and directing, about starting a production company, about being open to a Nashville or Heroes revival. None of that is on the list now. The list is the part that stays.
Previously we wrote: Tony DiNozzo is back on NCIS from October 6
