The ugly truth that makes Hayden Panettiere's death even more tragic... She charmed the world as a child star but a dark reality was playing out behind the scenes: TOM LEONARD

Playing a superpowered cheerleader with the ability to regenerate in Heroes provided the breakout role that shot Hayden Panettiere to fame in 2006.

But in real life, tragically, the troubled actress proved all too mortal.

Panettiere's younger brother, Jansen, also an actor, died of a heart condition in 2023 at age 28. And the actress had recently been candid about her own health issues, including alcoholism, drug abuse and depression – the last of these enveloping her after the birth of her daughter with Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko in 2014.

She also had another challenge to overcome – one that has crushed plenty of others – childhood fame driven relentlessly, she claimed, by a pushy stage mother.

On Sunday, Panettiere died at age 36 in an apartment, believed to be an Airbnb, in South Carolina, with Narcan – a nasal spray used to reverse the effects of opioid overdose – reportedly nearby. According to audio from the 911 dispatch, paramedics responded to a call about the 'unresponsive' actress who was in 'cardiac arrest' after a suspected overdose.

Panettiere's death is the latest in a long list of successful child actors who have succumbed to the pressures and rewards of early fame, beginning with River Phoenix who died at just 23 of a drug overdose in 1993.

Others have included Panettiere's late Ice Princess co-star Michelle Trachtenberg, who struggled with addiction; Brad Renfro (just 11 when he had a starring role in the 1994 legal thriller The Client) who died of an overdose at 25; teen heartthrob Jonathan Brandis who died by suicide at age 27; and Disney Channel star Lee Thompson Young who died by suicide aged 29.

Like Panettiere – who appeared in her first commercial when she was just 11 months old and was in the ABC soap opera One Life to Live by the age of four – they struggled with the substance abuse and depression that can easily afflict successful young actors.

Some are unable to cope with the endless glare of the spotlight while others find themselves similarly at sea when the spotlight suddenly fades and their success doesn't continue into adulthood.

And often, they have Hollywood parents, sometimes unsuccessful actors trying to achieve stardom for offspring that eluded them in their own career, pushing enthusiastically from the wings.

Raised in suburban New York, Panettiere's mother, Lesley Vogel, had been a soap opera actress but focused her attentions instead on managing her only daughter's acting career.

The pair bitterly fell out over this relationship. 'From a very young age, I lost the chance to have a normal childhood, friends, relationships, and my privacy,' Panettiere wrote in her tell-all memoir, This Is Me, which was published earlier this year.

She told the Hollywood Reporter she had been 'groomed' to be an actor, saying: 'I was like a little soldier and I always have been. "No" was never an option.'

In another interview, with podcaster Jay Shetty, she recalled: 'Everything was business. I became the confidant and the assistant and the therapist and the shoulder to cry on and everything but her child.'

Hayden said she tried to remove her mother, who was divorced from Panettiere's father, Skip, as her manager when she was 19, prompting a domestic meltdown.

'I said to her, 'I don't want us to work together anymore. I just want you to be my mom,' said Panettiere.

'I remember being hopeful. But I also wasn't expecting the reaction that I got, which was, "You owe me." And that's all she said. And she walked out.'

The actress said that discovering that her mother 'didn't care to have a relationship with me was a tough pill to swallow.'

She didn't only blame her mother for her fragile mental state but also attacked the way Hollywood manipulated actors. 'Directors, fans, and Mom praised me endlessly for my over-the-top dramatic responses,' she wrote in her memoir. 'Subconsciously, I began to associate catastrophe with adoration; people loved me because make-believe bad things happened to me.'

Her mother was equally withering about Panettiere, accusing her daughter of creating 'drama' in order to sell her book.

'There is a personality "style" which manifests as a need for control, entitlement and a lack of empathy,' she said of Panettiere. 'The major fear is that someone will see through the mask they present to the world and discover who they truthfully are.'

She said her daughter was the type who 'does not accept responsibility for life choices and therefore feels they have no need to alter their behavior.'

'After 20 years of trauma', said Vogel, she had taken the advice of professionals and cut off contact with her daughter.

'As many parents of entertainment children [know], we are all too familiar with the painful observation of watching the self-destructive paths they sometimes choose,' she told the New York Post. 'No parent hopes for this scenario; we want our children to be the best of themselves and live a peaceful, joyful life!'

'Sadly, this is out of our control. You cannot save someone who does not want to be saved.'

Panettiere certainly followed the standard path of the child actor climbing the greasy Hollywood pole, from TV commercials into small-screen roles, her first being, aged nine, to provide the voice of Dot, one of the characters in the 1998 Pixar animated comedy A Bug's Life.

In 2000, she appeared on screen with Denzel Washington in the sports drama Remember the Titans. She also had parts in the long-running TV series Ally McBeal and the 2004 comedy movie Raising Helen starring Kate Hudson.

Her own first starring role came the same year, playing the daughter of Bill Pullman's navy commander character in the family drama Tiger Cruise on the Disney Channel.

While 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 said she continued to be 'bothered' by the injuries she suffered more than 20 years later.

Panettiere was 17 when Heroes, in which she played the invulnerable cheerleader Claire Bennet, made her an international star. The series was a hit for NBC and ran for four seasons between 2006 and 2010.

Panettiere would later earn two Golden Globe nominations for her next role in Nashville, a musical TV drama series in which she played a country music star struggling to maintain her fame.

She also appeared as Kirby Reed in the fourth and sixth instalments of the Scream horror movie franchise as Kirby Reed in 2011's Scream 4 and 2023's Scream VI.

After an apparently on-off relationship with heavyweight boxer Klitschko which started in 2009, Panettiere announced in 2013 that they were engaged, the actress joining him at pro-EU protests in Kyiv that year in support of the boxer's politician brother.

They never married but they had a daughter, Kaya, together in late December 2014. However, the following year she entered rehab while filming Nashville and, when the girl was two, Klitschko suggested she lived with him full-time, said Panettiere.

The couple had already split up, and the actress said she reluctantly agreed so she could recover from what she called a 'horrible cycle for years of battling depression and anxiety and alcoholism and substance abuse.'

The Ukrainian assumed full custody of Kaya in 2018 – and she now lives with him in Ukraine – but her mother later bristled at what she said was a widespread misconception that she 'just gave up on my child,' saying: 'That could not be farther from the truth.'

Four years later, in 2022, she opened up about the terrible extent to which her life had collapsed off camera at that time.

She told People magazine that there had been 'just this gray color in my life' as she revealed she'd had secret addictions to opioids and alcohol, as well as a devastating bout of post-partum depression.

Panettiere went on Good Morning America to admit that 'I didn't know where the alcoholism was ending and the postpartum was beginning. I ran myself pretty ragged.'

She told People that 'I was on top of the world and I ruined it' as she plunged into a 'cycle of self-destruction.'

She also revealed another aspect to the dark side of Hollywood, saying she was just 15 when someone on her team began to offer her 'happy pills' before she walked the red carpets.

'They were to make me peppy during interviews. I had no idea that this was not an appropriate thing, or what door that would open for me when it came to my addiction,' she said.

She was drinking heavily and taking opioids even as her career was flourishing with Heroes. 'My saving grace is that I couldn't be messy while on set and working. But things kept getting out of control [off set]. And as I got older, the drugs and alcohol became something I almost couldn't live without.'

She sought treatment for her depression but, after giving up drinking during her pregnancy, she returned to alcohol as a mother because, she said, she felt she needed it to make it through each day.

'I never had the feeling that I wanted to harm my child, but I didn't want to spend any time with her,' she said.

Although she tried to do it in secret, the drinking predictably destroyed her relationship with Klitschko.

'He didn't want to be around me,' she told People. 'I didn't want to be around me. But with the opiates and alcohol I was doing anything to make me feel happy for a moment. Then I'd feel worse than I did before. I was in a cycle of self-destruction.'

She reached a point when she would have the shakes as soon as she woke up and could only function by sipping alcohol.

The drinking became so bad that she had to go to hospital, suffering from jaundice. Doctors warned her that her liver was going to stop functioning, and she spent eight months in rehab.

Panettiere insisted she was 'just so grateful to be part of this world again, and I will never take it for granted again,' while People magazine also implied that Panettiere was over her rough patch, describing the actress's 'journey to sobriety and happiness.'

But she would never quite be able to shake off her turbulent past. Sources told the Daily Mail on Monday that she had struggled to get work in Hollywood, dogged by her reputation for being a 'problem' on sets.

And a subsequent sit-down interview with People in 2024 sparked renewed concerns for Panettiere in light of the devastating loss of her brother Jansen a year prior. While opening up about her heartbreak over his death, she seemingly slurred her speech and appeared drowsy, though she later attributed her behavior to being sleep deprived.

A source would go on to tell Page Six on Monday that, during what was her final public appearance at a book signing just months before her death, Panettiere's speech again 'appeared slow and slurred.'

Promoting her memoir and 'reliving a lot of the bad stuff' from her life, a source previously told the Daily Mail, 'probably wasn't healthy for her' nor did it likely 'put her in a good place.'

The same insider revealed that Panettiere also struggled with the loss of her only sibling who died suddenly from an enlarged heart (cardiomegaly) coupled with aortic valve complications.

To the day she died, the source said, she was 'tortured' by his death.

She also never got over the loss of her daughter, calling her decision to give up custody 'the hardest thing I ever had to do.' She added: 'But I wanted to be a good mom to her — and sometimes that means letting them go.'

That longing apparently never eased. In May, she confided to podcaster Jay Shetty: 'I will always want her here. I always miss her. I always want to have my arms wrapped around her, but that's just not the way life is right at this moment … I have faith that she is going to come to me and that we're going to have an incredible relationship and bond and friendship that a lot of parents don't get to have with their kids.'

Panettiere would have turned 37 this Friday. If any further proof were needed, her tragic death appears to provide yet another example of the corroding effect of Hollywood stardom – especially for those far too young to cope with it.