Hayden Panettiere: the actor entire shows were rewritten for

Actor Hayden Panettiere became widely known in 2006, at age 17, for playing Claire Bennet in Heroes, though she was already an industry veteran by then. She landed her first soap opera role on One Life to Live at just four years old, later had a recurring part on Guiding Light, and voiced a character in A Bug's Life, earning a Grammy nomination for her work on the film.

On Heroes, her character Claire — a cheerleader who could instantly heal from any injury — became one of the show's defining figures. Producers originally planned to rotate the cast of superheroes each season, but audience affection kept Panettiere in the role for all six seasons. One academic has argued the character symbolically embodied the American dream, representing strength, resilience and warm-hearted decency. She played a similarly wholesome, family-oriented role two years earlier in the 2004 film Tiger Cruise, alongside her brother Jansen. The siblings came from a show-business family — their mother, Lesley Vogel, was a soap actor. Jansen later appeared in The Forger alongside Lauren Bacall, but died in 2023 at just 28 from complications related to an enlarged heart.

After Heroes ended in 2010, Panettiere took on a less successful project, a dramatisation of the Amanda Knox case, before landing the lead role in Nashville in 2012 as country singer Juliette Barnes — a part that brought her renewed popularity across six seasons.

Her personal life has been more turbulent. After the birth of her daughter in 2014, she experienced postnatal depression. In 2018, she separated from her fiance, boxer Wladimir Klitschko, giving up custody of their daughter to him. Her subsequent relationship with Brian Hickerson was marked by domestic abuse, and he was convicted following his arrest in 2021. A Heroes writer later paid tribute to Panettiere, calling her more than an actress — a muse.