Hayden Panettiere: an actor so magnetic that entire shows were rewritten for her

She starred in her first soap opera at 4 – then the hit show Heroes was totally reworked to allow her character, Claire the regenerating cheerleader, to live on. We celebrate the star, who has died age 36 Hayden Panettiere – a life in pictures Hayden Panettiere obituary When Hayden Panettiere arrived as Claire Bennet in Heroes, in 2006, she was 17 but not a newcomer. She’d starred in Tiger Cruise, a Disney Channel movie, two years before and was the pin-perfect image of that teen-star world – 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 – that fact partly informed the view of one academic, professor Olvido Andújar Molina, that Bennet was standing in for the American dream, its core components being strength, resilience and a sweet-natured homeliness. In Tiger Cruise, Panettiere had filled a similar role, the cute-as-a-button daughter of