Hayden Panettiere dead at 36

The Heroes actress - who had 11-year-old Kaya with former fiancé Wladimir Klitschko - was hailed an "incredible light and a force of nature" by her devastated father Alan Panettiere, who announced she had passed away on Sunday (16.08.26).

Alan said in a statement shared by Hayden's representative: “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."

Her father asked for privacy "as our family takes time to process this unimaginable loss."

The circumstances surrounding the Nashville star's passing have not been revealed.

Hayden was just eight months old when she began working, having signed up with Wilhelmina Models.

Her first professional acting role came in ABC soap opera One Life to Live in 1994 and she went on to appear in CBS' Guiding Light in 1996, returning to the show from 1997 to 2000.

Hayden's movie debut came when she was nine years old, as the narrator and voice of Princess dot in 1996's A Bug's Life and in 2000 she appeared in Remember the Titans.

She became a household name playing cheerleader Claire Bennett in Heroes, which began in 2006 and after it ended, she starred in Scream 4 in 2011.

From 2012 to 2018, she starred in all six seasons of Nashville and returned to the Scream franchise in 2023's Scream 6. Her final movie, Sleepwalker, was released in January this year.

Hayden, who also released music over the years, had a troubled personal life and in her recent memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, she detailed years of domestic abuse, battles with alcoholism and stints in rehab, and struggles with undiagnosed postpartum depression after the birth of Kaya.

She previously told Us Weekly about the book: “I talk about traumatic moments and things that people don’t even know about. The abuse I went through at the hands of people that were supposed to be there to protect me.

"Admitting to all of the things that I did. I knew if I was going to do this, I wanted to be brutally, painfully honest.

“When I was honest about postpartum depression on Live With Kelly and Michael [in 2015], the repercussions were shocking. After that interview, I had no idea when I walked off that stage that I was going to get the call saying, ‘Neutrogena wants to fire you. They’re not OK with this.’ And you’re going, ‘Wait a second, of all the things, how can they judge me about something that is so human and so real?’”