Hayden Panettiere, the actress known for playing Claire Bennet on Heroes and voicing Kairi in the Kingdom Hearts series, has died at age 36. First responders found her unresponsive and in cardiac arrest at a home in Greenville, South Carolina, on Sunday, and officials pronounced her dead that afternoon, according to ABC News.
Investigators have not determined the cause of Hayden Panettiere’s death, and an investigation is ongoing. Her father, Skip Panettiere, released a statement calling her “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 Kingdom Hearts and Until Dawn roles
Panettiere voiced Kairi, the closest friend of protagonists Sora and Riku, starting with the original Kingdom Hearts in 2002. She reprised the role across the series’ mainline sequels, including Kingdom Hearts II and Kingdom Hearts III, and also voiced Xion in Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance. Kingdom Hearts, a collaboration between Square Enix and Disney, is one of the best-selling action role-playing franchises of the past two decades, and Kairi has appeared in nearly every mainline entry since the series began in 2002.
In 2015, she played Samantha “Sam” Giddings, one of eight friends trapped on a snowbound mountain, in Until Dawn, the horror game from Supermassive Games that helped establish the cinematic branching-narrative format on PlayStation.
Heroes, Scream and a career on screen
Panettiere’s breakout role came in 2006, when she played Claire Bennet, a cheerleader with regenerative powers, on NBC’s Heroes. She later starred as Kirby Reed in Scream 4 and reprised the role in 2023’s Scream VI, and played Juliette Barnes on ABC’s Nashville for six seasons. Her film credits include Remember the Titans, one of the roles she said she loved filming most.
Panettiere began acting before she could walk, appearing in television commercials at 11 months old and taking her first soap opera role at age 5. She joined the voice cast of Pixar’s A Bug’s Life and the animated sitcom Dinosaurs as a child, and continued voice acting for years on shows including Fillmore! and Robot Chicken before Heroes made her a lead.
In May, Panettiere published a memoir titled This Is Me: A Reckoning, in which she wrote about growing up as a child star and about her struggles with addiction and postpartum depression. She had most recently appeared in the 2026 thriller Sleepwalker.
What we know about the Hayden Panettiere death investigation
Authorities in Greenville have not released further details on the circumstances of her death, and they have not made toxicology results public. Panettiere’s younger brother, actor Jansen Panettiere, died in 2023 at age 19 of an enlarged heart, a condition his family said ran in the family. Panettiere is survived by her daughter, Kaya, whom she shared with former partner Wladimir Klitschko, and by her parents.