Hayden Panettiere's Films and TV Shows: The Work She Leaves Behind

Hayden Panettiere died on Sunday 16 August 2026 in Greenville, South Carolina. She was 36.

Her representative confirmed the death, and the coroner’s office has said the cause is pending further investigation. Her father, Skip Panettiere, called her “an incredible light and a force of nature” and asked for the family’s privacy.

She had been acting since she was a small child. This is what she leaves behind.

What was Hayden Panettiere best known for?

Two television roles, twenty years apart in tone and a decade apart in time.

Heroes made her famous at 17 — the indestructible cheerleader whose survival was the show’s opening puzzle. Nashville gave her the role she worked longest in: a country star written with far more difficulty and appetite than the part usually allows, across six seasons.

Before either, she was already a working actor for more than a decade.

Her films

She started in features at nine and was in one of the most-watched American sports films by eleven.

The Kirby Reed return is worth singling out. She played the character in Scream 4 in 2011, the character was left ambiguous, and she came back for Scream VI in 2023 — this time as an FBI agent. Reporting at the time noted she had approached the filmmakers herself about resurrecting the role.

Her television work

She was on daytime soaps from the age of five.

Her voice and video game roles

A generation knows her voice without knowing her face — as Kairi.

Until Dawn is the one that keeps finding new audiences: a horror game built around performance capture, in which Sam is among the characters a player can keep alive or lose.

What was her last film?

Sleepwalker, a psychological thriller released on 9 January 2026. She starred as Sarah Pangborn, an artist grieving her daughter, and was also an executive producer on it. It was written and directed by Brandon Auman.

It came after a long step back from acting and a deliberate return: Scream VI in 2023, then Amber Alert in 2024, then this.

Where can you watch her work?

Some of it is straightforward; most of it depends on where you are and when you look.

Recent reporting places Sleepwalker on Prime Video and Amber Alert on Hulu. Beyond those two, availability moves — rights for a catalogue this old and this scattered change hands regularly, and what streams in the United States often differs from what streams elsewhere.

Rather than print a list that will be wrong by winter, the honest advice is to search the title itself in whichever services you already subscribe to. The Disney titles, the Scream films and the two long-running series each sit with different rights holders, and none of that is stable enough to be worth stating as fact here.

She worked for thirty-one of her thirty-six years. The range in the tables above — a Pixar princess at nine, a football coach’s daughter at eleven, a cheerleader who could not be killed, a country star, a final film she helped produce — is not a normal career, and it was not close to finished.