Hayden Panettiere was found dead in South Carolina on Sunday at age 36. Since then, fans, co-stars, and a wider Hollywood have poured out tributes to the actress, who left behind a career of nearly 60 credits that began when she was five years old.
Panettiere got her first role in the daytime soap One Life to Live as a young child. By 10, she had landed the role of Sheryl Yoast in Disney's Remember the Titans, playing the football-obsessed daughter of assistant coach Bill Yoast opposite Denzel Washington. In her memoir This Is Me: A Reckoning, Panettiere recalled nearly not getting the part because she was deemed the pretty "JonBenét Ramsey type," which made her even more determined to nail the audition. She also described the job as the "biggest role" of her life. "It was the happiest I'd ever felt as an actor," she wrote. "If I could go back and do it all over again, I would in a heartbeat."
Her most noted roles later in her career came in the NBC series Heroes, where she played a breakout character during the show's first season in 2006, and in Nashville, the musical drama she joined in 2012. She also appeared in the Scream franchise.
But it was the 2005 Disney film Ice Princess that struck a specific chord on social media following her death, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The film also starred Michelle Trachtenberg, who died last year at age 39. In Ice Princess, Panettiere played Gennifer "Gen" Harwood, the rival-turned-ally of Trachtenberg's Casey Carlyle, a brainy student who gives up her path to Harvard to pursue figure skating. "First day when they gave us about six weeks to train, I was like Bambi on ice," Panettiere recalled of the role in 2024. "By the end I actually became really good."
Video compilations of the two actresses' characters have been circulating on TikTok, with fans acknowledging the film's comforting nostalgia alongside the grief. "Our ice princesses are together again," one fan wrote. Another shared, "RIP to our ice princesses. This is the movie that inspired me to start figure skating and will always hold a special place in my heart." Kim Cattrall, who played the pushy figure skating coach Tina Harwood in the film, paid tribute on Instagram Monday, writing, "Rest in peace sweet Hayden. Gone far too soon."
Less widely known was Panettiere's political advocacy for Ukraine. She and boxer Wladimir Klitschko met at a party in 2008 and began dating the following year. Their relationship was public and, at times, dramatic. She attended his fights, and he sometimes appeared at her Hollywood events. They became engaged in 2013 and had a daughter, Kaya, the following year.
Panettiere joined Klitschko and his brother Vitali onstage at the Maidan protests in central Kyiv in December 2013, as Ukraine pushed to oust Putin-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych and join the EU. She addressed the crowd directly. "Keep fighting," she said. "The world will hear you." Yanukovych fled in February 2014. Russia invaded Crimea days later. Vitali Klitschko was elected mayor of Kyiv in May of that year, a position he has continued to hold.
Panettiere was 36. Both her death and Trachtenberg's, which occurred within two years of each other, have come as a shock to fans who grew up watching them. "Can't believe both of our ice princesses are gone," one person wrote on TikTok.
