feature image photo by Michael Kovac / Contributor via Getty Images

The actor Hayden Panettiere has died at the age of 36, confirmed by a statement issued by her father. This devastating news comes just a few months after Panettiere came out as bisexual, news the Autostraddle team excitedly celebrated in our virtual office. We’d been longtime fans of her massive body of work. Today, the office mood is decidedly more morose.

Part of why Panettiere came out as queer back in May was because it was discussed in her memoir This Is Me: A Reckoning, which debuted that same month. In it, she details her experiences as a lifelong working actor and growing up in the spotlight. She also opens up about her experiences with familial abuse, partner abuse, addiction, postpartum depression, and the unexpected loss of her brother, who died at 28.

Already, I can feel my hackles rising in anticipation of the way her death will be written about in mainstream media due to these very real struggles. So often, famous people who die who experienced addiction, trauma, and abuse are suddenly defined solely by these tragedies, their lives sensationalized and death rendered inevitable. I do not subscribe to that way of eulogizing anyone, even when it comes to public figures who I did not know. While of course the very real and very hard things Panettiere lived through and wrote about in her memoir are important to talk about and should not be swept under the rug, I also think we should meet her death with compassion, grace, empathy, and an understanding that she was more than just the bad stuff that happened to her.

If it feels like you can’t really remember a time when Panettiere wasn’t on your screen, you’re not alone. She quite literally acted her entire life, starting with commercials when she was only 11 months old. From there, she moved to soaps, starring in One Life to Live from ages five to eight and in Guiding Light from ages seven to eleven. She made her feature film debut at nine-years-old in A Bug’s Life, voicing Princess Dot. And if you’re my age (which is to say, close in age to Hayden), then you probably deeply associate her younger years with Remember the Titans, in which she played Will Patton’s daughter.

She continued to book television gigs, including main (Ally McBeal), recurring (Malcolm in the Middle) and guest roles (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit). Then came the late aughts and 2010s, when Panettiere had some of the best roles of her career, including as the superpowered cheerleader Claire Bennet in the show Heroes (appointment television in my teenage years), as fan favorite character Kirby in Scream 4 (a character I clocked as bisexual, even if it was never canonically established and far before Panettiere herself came out), and as fictional country music star Juliette Barnes in the musical series Nashville (a role I always thought she deserved more awards attention for). Speaking of Nashville, I’m listening to “Love Like Mine” from season one as I write this. Fourteen years later, it still rocks.

There is something so strikingly sad about her death happening on the heels of her memoir. The memoir was, I think, her attempt to reclaim agency and control over her life’s story. Like so many young people who grew up in Hollywood, subject to its various (and vicious) press cycles, she often lacked that control over how she was perceived and discussed. Child stars become adults but are often still boxed in and held up against their younger selves, fans and the press not allowing them to grow or change. I’m sure much will be dissected about Hayden’s life in the coming weeks, but again, I am uninterested in speculation or sensationalizing.  My heart goes out to her 11-year-old daughter and all the people who knew her — the real her, the one she hoped to show us by writing her story down.