Hayden Panettiere, who has died at the age of 36, lived most of her life in the spotlight - from success as a child star to lead roles in hit TV shows Heroes and Nashville - but also endured struggles that went along with the pressures of fame. Panettiere appeared in her first commercial when she was 11 months old. Her mother Lesley Vogel was an actress and set her daughter on the same path.
By the age of four, Hayden was in US TV show One Life to Live, then at eight joined another soap opera, Guiding Light. Her natural acting ability was evident, but the burgeoning childhood career came at a cost. "From a very young age, I lost the chance to have a normal childhood, friends, relationships, and my privacy," Panettiere wrote in her revealing autobiography, This Is Me, which was published earlier this year.
She was "groomed" to be an actor, she told the Hollywood Reporter, external. "I was like a little soldier and I always have been. No was never an option." Panettiere's career flourished and she soon earned roles like the voice of Princess Dot in Pixar's A Bug's Life in 1998, becoming one of the youngest ever Grammy Award nominees for the accompanying children's read-along album.
She starred with Denzel Washington in American football drama Remember the Titans in 2000; and had roles in TV's Ally McBeal and 2004's Raising Helen with Kate Hudson. When filming 2005's Racing Stripes, a children's film about a zebra who thinks it's a race horse, she suffered a back injury when she fell off a zebra, and "over 20 years later, these injuries still bother me", she wrote. She also starred in 2006 cheerleading comedy Bring It On: All or Nothing, the third instalment in the Bring It On film series.
Also in 2006, she achieved a new level of fame when superhero TV show Heroes became a major hit. Panettiere's character Claire Bennet, a cheerleader with powers of spontaneous regeneration, was at the heart of the show's "save the cheerleader, save the world" premise. She was 16 and the fame came with new levels of attention, including from swarms of paparazzi.
They kicked her and said "appalling" things to attempt to get a reaction, she said, while one headline trumpeted a picture of her apparent cellulite. "I suffered from body dysmorphia for years because of that, believing that no matter how strong, thin or young I was, there was no escaping the dreaded cottage cheese thighs." At one point, she was given a "happy pill" by a publicist to help her perform on a red carpet. That ended up being "the gateway drug that ushered me toward the good of pharmaceuticals and the downfall of addiction", she said.
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