The struggles behind Panettiere’s successpublished at 08:24 BST
08:24 BST
Yasmin Rufo
Culture reporter
Earlier this year, Hayden Panettiere released her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, reflecting on the struggles of growing up as a child actor and her experiences with addiction, abuse and motherhood.
She wrote of the relentless nature of growing up in the entertainment industry and told the BBC’s US partner CBS News that her mother was taking an “eight-month-old baby into audition rooms”.
“It went from there and progressed into 50 commercials by the time I was five… It just never stopped,” she said.
Her memoir also includes her struggles with mental health, addiction throughout her twenties and the loss of her younger brother, Jansen.
Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption,
Panettiere and boxer Wladimir Klitschko share a daughter, born in 2014
After the birth of her daughter, Kaya, in 2014, Panettiere revealed that she had entered treatment for postpartum depression.
In 2018 she gave full custody
of her daughter to her former partner, Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko.
She said: “I was struggling
with mental health and anxiety and the postpartum and having to act my way
through it and just feeling like I completely lost myself.”
Speaking to podcaster Jay
Shetty after the release of her memoir in May, Panettiere said it was
“heartbreaking” that people believed she had simply given up her
child, saying that this was “couldn’t be further from the truth”.