Hayden Panettiere, Heroes and Nashville star, dies at 36

Hayden Panettiere, who first captured the world's imagination as an indestructible cheerleader and later revealed the very real fragility beneath her public life, has died at 36. She spent her years navigating the paradox of performing invulnerability while privately contending with depression, addiction, and the slow work of recovery — a tension she had only recently begun to name in print. Her death follows the sudden loss of her younger brother Jansen in 2023, and leaves behind a daughter she hoped one day to hold again, and a family asked now to bear the unbearable a second time.