A tricky relationship with a stage ‘mom’, addiction, depression and a custody row – all of these were storylines that the actor Hayden Panettiere had to grapple with during her stint on the TV show Nashville, playing a talented but troubled young country singer. Off screen, the Golden Globe nominee was dealing with similar conflicts. “My character, Juliette, and me as Hayden, I didn’t know where one person began and the other one ended,” she later admitted.

Having to act out episodes that were being mirrored in her personal life, and serve them up for the viewing pleasure of an audience, can’t have been easy. But these fictionalised struggles only ever really provided a surface look at what the star, who has died at the age of 36, was going through behind the scenes.

On Monday morning, her father Skip Panettiere announced her “tragic passing”, describing the former child star, best known for her role as a high school cheerleader with superpowers in the TV drama Heroes, as “an incredible light and a force of nature who brought immeasurable love and joy to all who knew her – and to the millions who watched her on screen”.

No cause of death has been confirmed, but police in Greenville, South Carolina, said a preliminary investigation has not indicated any signs of foul play or suspicious circumstances.

That it was only Skip, a former firefighter, who put his name to this sad statement will perhaps not have come as much of a surprise to anyone who has read Panettiere’s memoir, This is Me: A Reckoning. Released earlier this year, her autobiography reckons not just with the pressures of coming of age as a young female star during the Noughties, but with her complex family relationships, including her estrangement from her mother, and the deep pain she felt at the sudden and unexpected passing of her only brother just a few years ago.

Panettiere spent almost her entire life in the spotlight. Her mother Lesley Vogel had previously appeared on soaps, and signed her baby daughter up for modelling and acting gigs from the age of just four months. She’d go on to star in adverts, crop up in TV shows, voice a Pixar character and act opposite Denzel Washington.

But as with so many child stars, professional success and parental approval seemed to become jumbled up. “Getting that kind of praise so young made me feel empowered and happy,” she told The Independent’s Adam White earlier this year. “But it was also all wrapped up in pleasing my mom. Her opinions were the most important to me. I associated praise with love. So being praised felt like being loved.”

Disappointing her mother, the actor claimed in her memoir, was “a fate worse than death”; she even alleges that Vogel superglued one of her baby teeth back into her mouth before an audition, because a gappy smile might cost her the job. She was raised, she said, “like a little soldier” who “took [her] marching orders”, and to her, the mother-daughter relationship felt like it was all business, with her mum seeming more like a “boss” then her parent.

And, as is another common refrain in the life of a child star, Panettiere’s career supported her family financially, she claimed. By the time she was 19, though, and riding high on the success of Heroes, she decided to sever her business relationship with Vogel, in the hopes of preserving their family ties. “I said to her, ‘I don’t want us to work together any more,’” she recalled. “‘I just want you to be my mom.’”

Her mother, she claims, reacted with three words: “You owe me.” Speaking to The Independent earlier this year, Panettiere suggested that “having a normal relationship [with her daughter” wasn’t something that interested” Vogel, “and it was also maybe something she wasn’t even capable of” – she was still tentatively hopeful, though, that they might reconcile at some future point.

Vogel, for her part, has claimed that she chose “the no-contact route” with her daughter, after seeking professional advice. “As many parents of entertainment children [know], we are all too familiar with the painful observations of watching the self-destructive paths they sometimes choose,” she said earlier this year, following the release of Panettiere’s memoir, adding that “radical acceptance is the most difficult challenge any parent must embrace”.

Just a year or so after this breach with her mother, Panettiere would go on to meet Wladimir Klitschko, the Ukrainian heavyweight boxing champion, at a book launch party; already jaded by the entertainment industry, Panettiere was drawn to how distinctly un-Hollywood the boxer seemed, and the pair started dating soon after, although having to spend long stretches apart due to their very different careers took its toll on the relationship, which initially ended in 2011.

Just two years later, though, they were back together and announced their engagement; in 2014, they welcomed a daughter, Kaya. The birth, though, was deeply traumatic for Panettiere, who suffered severe bleeding after a C-section, and ended up undergoing seven blood transfusions.

She struggled to bond with her new baby – it was a task, she later wrote in This Is Me, that seemed “insurmountable”, as she felt “a total blackout of emotion”. In the grip of postpartum depression, Panettiere decided to do what she did best – play the part, this time of the happy new mother. And in doing so, her substance abuse spiralled.

Panettiere had first started using drugs as a teenager, when a former team member offered her a “happy pill” before she headed onto the red carpet to promote Heroes; this, the actor reflected, was the “gateway drug that ushered me toward the good of pharmaceuticals and the downfall of addiction”.

But after the birth, her alcohol use stepped up, to the point where she “would have the shakes when I woke up and could only function with sipping alcohol”, she later admitted. It was difficult for her to “know where the alcoholism was ending and the postpartum [depression] was beginning and I ran myself pretty ragged”.

She checked herself into rehab when Kaya was four months old; later, though, she started drinking again, and also became dependent on her prescription medication, while continuing to film her role as a country star in the TV show Nashville. In 2018, by which point their relationship had ended, Klitschko sued Panettiere for full custody of their daughter, while he and Kaya were on a trip to his home city of Kyiv.

I wanted to be a good mom to her – and sometimes that means letting them go

Rather than becoming embroiled in a drawn-out legal battle, she chose to sign the papers. It was, she later reflected, “the hardest thing I ever had to do. But I wanted to be a good mom to her – and sometimes that means letting them go”.

Kaya moved out to Ukraine permanently (Klitschko’s brother Vitali, also a former boxer, is the mayor of Kyiv, and the siblings have been prominent figures in the Ukrainian war effort). But Panettiere struggled to see her heartbreaking decision framed in tabloid headlines as some kind of shirking of her parental responsibility. “The idea that anyone would think that I would just simply give up my child, it blows my mind,” she told podcaster Jay Shetty earlier this year. “It couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

In fact, she wrote in her memoir, being so far from her daughter was “the most gut-wrenching experience of my life, and it’s hard to describe the layers of emotion – including sadness, resentment and anger – I’ve felt because of it”. No one, she added, “should ever have to raise a child on FaceTime”, and she spent a long time grieving “the mother I thought I’d be”.

Despite the distance, though, the pair managed to foster an “incredible relationship”, Panettiere said, with the actor travelling to see her daughter whenever possible. “We talk about really deep things,” she said. “We have a really intense, incredible bond, and I’m very grateful for that”.

After their split, too, Panettiere and Klitschko managed to rebuild a friendship, and the star was sure her daughter was aware that “she has two parents who would do anything in the world to make sure that she is happy and healthy mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, and she in no way feels abandoned”.

In 2023, though, another tragedy hit Panettiere’s family, when her younger brother Jansen, who was her only sibling, died suddenly at the age of just 28 from an undiagnosed enlarged heart and aortic valve complications. This sudden loss weighed heavily on the actor, who told People magazine that she felt like it had been her “job to protect him”; his death, she said, “felt like I lost half of my soul”.

And the passing of time, she admitted, didn’t do much to take away the sting. “I’ve always thought that time generally is the best healer, but with the death of my brother, every year it feels like it almost gets harder,” she said. “It becomes more real.” In another interview, she emphasised: “I will always be heartbroken about it. I will never be able to get over it. No matter how many years go by, I will never get over his loss.”

Panettiere’s parents are now in a truly harrowing position - that of seeing both of their children gone before them.