In her final months, Hayden Panettiere chose to be 'brutally honest'

Before her death, Hayden Panettiere spoke on challenges of life in spotlight In the final months before Hayden Panettiere's death at 36, the actor spoke candidly of her traumatic experiences and shared messages of inspiration. The former child star, known for her roles in TV shows such as Heroes and Nashville, was found unresponsive in an apartment in Greenville, South Carolina, and was pronounced dead at the scene on Sunday, police said. The cause of death is yet to be established, but police said there were no signs of foul play. Her death came just months after the publishing of her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning — a book in which she decided to be "brutally honest" about "every aspect of my life, from childhood to now". "I had to learn not to be afraid of what people would think about it. Or if they would judge me," she told The Independent newspaper in May. Panettiere experienced numerous hardships during her decades in the spotlight, including the death of her younger brother Jansen Panettiere in 2023. This is what the actress has said about growing up as a child actor, struggling with substance abuse and battling with her mental health. On being a child star Panettiere grew up as a child actor, performing in advertisements and soap operas before landing a voice acting role as Princess Dot in the 1998 movie A Bug's Life. Her mother, former soap opera actor Lesley Vogel, started taking Panettiere to commercial auditions when she was an infant. In her memoir, Panettiere wrote of how the traumatic storylines she portrayed in soap operas as a child led her to associate "catastrophe with adoration". "Grown-ups gave me positive attention when — as an actor — I failed, got sick, screamed and cried, killed, grieved, and suffered," she wrote. "Is it any wonder why I've faced so many real struggles in my life? I've often wondered whether — unintentionally — I've brought on my traumas because I'm wired to think they're good for me." Panettiere reached mainstream fame in 2006 for her role as a cheerleader with supernatural powers in the TV show Heroes, a role that led her whole family to relocate to Los Angeles. "My mum bought an apartment for me when I was 16 and my whole family lived in it. So again, it was just that very strange, uncomfortable feeling of the role reversal and desperately wanting to still feel like the kid and still feel like I had parents to lean on," Panettiere told host Jay Shetty on his podcast, On Purpose. She said she couldn't remember a time when her mother wasn't acting as a "momager" — a word referring to a mother who also manages the career of their famous child — and she feared disappointing her. "She was my boss, that's how I saw her. Even if she was the most supportive person when I did what I was supposed to do and did it well and was the one cheering me on, it did feel like it was what I had to do to get her love." On postpartum depression In 2014, 25-year-old Panettiere welcomed her daughter Kaya with her then-partner, former professional boxer Wladimir Klitschko. After giving birth, Panettiere was haemorrhaging and needed seven blood transfusions as well as surgery, she said in an interview to Momé in July. When she got to see her baby after the operation, Panettiere said she "felt nothing". "I had always heard that mums feel an instant rush of love, but I didn't — and I had no idea why," she told Momé. After trying to self-medicate with alcohol, Panettiere sought help and finally received a diagnosis of postpartum depression. Panettiere first opened up about her postpartum depression in 2015 on the US morning talk show Live with Kelly and Michael. "When they tell you about postpartum depression, you think about, 'Okay, I feel negative feelings towards my child, I want to injure my child, I want to hurt my child,'" she said. "I've never ever had those feelings and some women do, but you don't realise what broad of a spectrum you can really experience that on, and it's something, I think, that needs to be talked about and women need to know that they're not alone. "There's a lot of misunderstanding and I feel like there's a lot of people out there who think that it's not real, that it's not true, that it's something that's made up in their mind. "It's something that's completely uncontrollable and it's really painful and scary." In her interview with Shetty, Panettiere said cosmetics brand Neutrogena cancelled a decade-long endorsement deal with her after she spoke of her postpartum depression, citing a morality clause. "Of all the things I had been caught doing, that being the thing where they drew the line, was shocking to me," Panettiere said. On 'self-numbing' her anxiety On the set of her TV show Nashville, Panettiere said the struggles of her character Juliette closely mirrored what was happening in her private life, including writing around her pregnancy, substance abuse and struggles with parenthood. "I was suffering from debilitating anxiety and an addiction I couldn't shake, and I had to live through it twice. First at home, as Hayden, and then in front of millions as Juliette," she wrote in her memoir. "I didn't know where Juliette ended and Hayden began," she told Jay Shetty. "I couldn't come up to air from it." To soothe her anxiety and manage her panic attacks, she turned to substances. "I was self-medicating and looking for relief at the bottom of a bottle … I needed to self-numb." On losing custody of her daughter When Panettiere and Klitschko split in 2018, their daughter, who was two years old, began living full-time in Ukraine with her father. At the time, Panettiere was in the depths of battling her problems with substance abuse. "It wasn't a decision I made lightly, nor was it a decision I even wanted to make," she told Momé. "I was going through a really challenging time in my life … I knew I needed to be able to put her first so that I could get the help I needed and be the mum she needed me to be,"she said. "I love my daughter, and I'm so proud of the young woman she is becoming. I talk to her all the time, and I feel so connected to her." On leaving behind abuse In her interview with Shetty, Panettiere spoke of the support she needed to leave an abusive relationship she had been in. "At one point I thought I had gotten out of it and gotten away from it," she told Shetty. "Abusers, they weave themselves like weeds into your life and there's always something that they left behind. There's always something they have to come back for, there's always something that they find to keep that connection, keep you on the hook. "I thought I was capable of doing it by myself but I needed an incredible amount of support and back-up in order to make sure that there was no way for him to find his way back in." In her final post on Instagram on July 27, a photo of Panettiere with photographer Randall Slavin, Panettiere wrote: "Good times and good friends". In her memoir, Panettiere described herself as an "optimist to the core" who refused to be defined by tragedy. "One thing I know from my 36 years in the public eye is this: Life is a process that evolves day by day, year by year and — like it or not — you are engaged in a cycle of growth until the moment you take your last breath," she wrote.