Hayden Panettiere, who died aged 36. A month after speaking about her vulnerability

The American actress Hayden Panettiere died on Sunday in a flat in Greenville, South Carolina, where she was staying temporarily. The emergency call, which came in at around 1.50 pm local time, reported a cardiac arrest. The alarm was raised by an acquaintance of the actress. Paramedics attempted resuscitation but to no avail: the actress was pronounced dead at 2.32 pm, before she could even celebrate her 37th birthday, which she would have turned on 21 August.

The Greenville County Coroner’s Office has announced that the preliminary post-mortem examination revealed no signs of trauma attributable to the death. However, the cause and circumstances remain to be determined, pending further toxicological and clinical investigations. The case is being handled by Greenville Police in conjunction with the coroner’s office, but investigators have not, as yet, found any evidence to suggest a violent incident. She had arrived in South Carolina the day before with her partner, the actor Brian Hickerson, with whom she had been in an on-and-off relationship for several years.

His father, Skip Panettiere, has issued a brief statement in which he speaks of “an unimaginable loss” for the family, asking for privacy to be respected over the coming days.

Panettiere first came to prominence as a child, initially in adverts and soap operas, then on the big screen in "Remember the Titans" and "Bring It On: All or Nothing". The role that made her a star came in 2006, when she played Claire Bennet, the self-healing cheerleader in the series "Heroes", the year the NBC series became a global phenomenon. This was followed by "Nashville", where she played the singer Juliette Barnes for six series – a role that earned her a Critics’ Choice nomination – and a part in the horror franchise "Scream". In 2013, her engagement to the Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko, then the world heavyweight champion, brought her private life into the international spotlight.

Three months earlier, she had published a memoir, "This Is Me: A Reckoning", in which she recounted her early fame, motherhood and years of alcohol addiction and postnatal depression – a journey she had already spoken about publicly in 2022, in a television interview in which she described herself as being in recovery. In the book, she also revisited her decision in 2018 to temporarily relinquish custody of her daughter Kaya, born in 2014 from her relationship with Klitschko, and the death of her younger brother Jansen, also an actor, who passed away in 2023 at the age of 28 from an undiagnosed heart condition. Panettiere had spoken of the burden of that loss and the guilt that followed, describing the book as an attempt to ‘come to terms with things’, rather than a confession.