When Hayden Panettiere arrived as Claire Bennet in Heroes, in 2006, she was 17 but not a newcomer. She\u2019d starred in Tiger Cruise, a Disney Channel movie, two years before and was the pin-perfect image of that teen-star world \u2013 blond, cute, perky, resourceful and all-American. Bennet the superhero was all those things, amped up to the point of fascinating distortion. She was a cheerleader who could endlessly regenerate. It was a topic of hot debate on fan sites whether or not she could feel pain, a question that was resolved piecemeal through the series. She could, but could instantly overcome it with her superpower \u2013 that fact partly informed the view of one academic, professor Olvido And\u00fajar Molina, that Bennet was standing in for the American dream, its core components being strength, resilience and a sweet-natured homeliness.<\/p>\n
In Tiger Cruise, Panettiere had filled a similar role, the cute-as-a-button daughter of a naval commander, producing this elemental, almost mournful Oz-like message: \u201cEverything you long for is right here at home.\u201d She was from a showbiz family, her mother, Lesley Vogel, was a soap actor, and her brother, Jansen, who also possessed those perfectly symmetrical features, co-starred in Tiger Cruise, and later, in 2011, in The Forger (better known as the last film Lauren Bacall ever made). Jansen also died horribly young, of complications from an engorged heart, in 2023 aged 28. Panettiere got her first soap opera gig, in One Life to Live, at the age of four, and went on to a recurring role into Guiding Light before she was 10. She was the voice of Dot in A Bug\u2019s Life, and was nominated for a Grammy for her work on the film.<\/p>\n
Pin-perfect image of the teen star \u2026 Hayden Panettiere with Bill Pullman in Tiger Cruise. Photograph: Disney\/Allstar<\/p>\n
Perhaps because of how the cheerleader role landed on the collective imagination, and certainly because of Panettiere\u2019s performance, which had a magnetic complexity that always seemed at odds with how appealing she was, Bennet came to define Heroes. The showrunners originally intended to refresh the superheroes each series, to create a giant stable of ridiculously capable archetypes. In the end, bowing to audience preference, they wrote Panettiere into all six seasons. At one fan convention, Panettiere addressed how she was funnelled towards certain roles by her inescapably wholesome good looks: \u201cPeople look at me as either the popular cheerleader type or just the blond.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Heroes ended in 2010, perhaps trying to branch out, she took the lead role in Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy, an ill-conceived and poorly received project. But in 2012, a role came along in Nashville, which was perfect for her. As Juliette Barnes, a young country singer in a hurry, Panettiere embodied that bubble gum country music trope, the Dolly-Parton-beautiful singer on to whom a nation projects all its fantasies \u2013 of sweetness and innocence, of pluck. That ran for six seasons, and viewers lapped it up, with its excesses of plot and heartache and intrigue, especially in the first two seasons.<\/p>\n
\u2018Dolly-Parton-beautiful\u2019 \u2026 Hayden Panettiere as Juliette Barnes in Nashville. Photograph: ABC\/Allstar<\/p>\n
Despite her on-screen success, Panettiere\u2019s personal life was turbulent; after the birth of her daughter in 2014, she suffered postnatal depression. She separated from her fiance, the boxer Wladimir Klitschko, in 2018, relinquishing custody of their child to him the same year. Her relationship with her next boyfriend, Brian Hickerson, was marred by domestic abuse allegations and Hickerson was arrested multiple times. In 2021, he was reportedly jailed after pleading no contest to domestic abuse charges. Unsurprisingly, she did very little work during this period. Bryan Fuller, a writer on Heroes, said in tribute that \u201cshe was more than an actress, she was a muse\u201d. Such a patriarchally freighted remark, though clearly well meant, gestures at the challenges Panettiere faced, trying to create work while embodying so many people\u2019s fantasies of girlhood; but they were challenges she met, and exceeded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Hayden Panettiere arrived as Claire Bennet in Heroes, in 2006, she was 17 but not a newcomer.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":858658,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-858657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=858657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/858658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}