Hayden Panettiere Should Be Remembered for Her Performances, Not the Tabloid Press Trying to Solve Her Tragic Death

That’s a thought worth remembering, and a fitting example of the roles Panettiere fit especially well. But the “Ice Princess” tributes flooding the internet since her death also demonstrate how quickly entire lives can be compressed into a single tragic image.

From the indestructible cheerleader on “Heroes” to the ferociously ambitious country singer on “Nashville,” the late Panettiere was particularly beloved among millennial women. Blonde and objectively beautiful, she specialized in playing female characters whose familiar surfaces often concealed complex inner worlds tangled up in forces of darkness. Even the seemingly unattainable dream girl Panettiere played in 2009’s “I Love You, Beth Cooper” turned out to be funnier, kinder, and more vulnerable than anyone in her predictably shallow high school expects.

On screens big and small, Panettiere could refract the light around the archetype she embodied until something messier and more human shone through her performance. That was particularly radical in the 2000s, and considering the struggles women face in the U.S. right now, it’s no wonder fans reached for the girl-power nostalgia of “Ice Princess” to process this death. The imagined reunion with Trachtenberg depicted in those remembrance posts is tender, and the grief behind losing both actresses is very real. But even in the context of Panettiere’s shocking death this past weekend, the theoretical scene — two young women finally free to just skate — cannot capture the real people they were or explain either loss.

Hayden Panettiere and Michelle Trachtenberg in ‘Ice Princess’©Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection

Hollywood obituaries tend to develop along two parallel tracks. There are artistic appreciations, which reconsider a celebrity’s life primarily through the work they produced. And there are tabloid stories, which operate like miniature true-crime dramas — inviting audiences to assemble causes, clues, timelines, and previously disclosed struggles until the deceased becomes the central character in the mystery of their own death.

The fascination is understandable, and the facts underlying Panettiere’s death are a matter of legitimate public interest. Her cause of death has not been determined, but speculation has already gathered around the addiction and depression she discussed publicly. Interviews from her recent memoir tour will inevitably be reconsidered for warning signs. But when a particularly high-profile person in Hollywood dies under unusual circumstances, that search for answers can rapidly overwhelm consideration of the life and work that preceded it.

It would be easy to blame that impulse entirely on tabloids and true-crime obsessives. The more uncomfortable truth is that it can shape even the sincerest expressions of grief.

When I learned Panettiere had died, I could almost picture her reacting to the news herself. I imagined the tenderly apologetic expression she might make after some terrible mistake, because I had seen her deliver versions of that moment on “Nashville” and in movies like “Ice Princess.”

Then I felt ashamed. I do not and did not know Hayden Panettiere. What I knew was the emotional vocabulary of her performances. I knew how often her characters pursued redemption, and without realizing it, I had converted those familiar arcs into a final scene in my head that cast Panettiere as explaining herself to an audience that wasn’t there.

Unusual circumstances can expand our understanding of an artist, raising legitimate questions and illuminating aspects of a career that deserves serious consideration. But they also alter a celebrity’s cultural shorthand. “Actor from ‘Heroes’ and ‘Nashville’” can quickly become “tragic star whose death remains unexplained.” And once that happens, honest grief becomes harder to metabolize as a viewer. Curiosity about the unknowable begins masquerading as intimacy, and you can be left feeling both heartbroken and filled with self-disgust.

‘Nashville’©ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection

We saw that tension most clearly after Rob and Michele Reiner were killed, also last year. Responsible journalists had to acknowledge the extraordinary circumstances of the married couple’s death — while keeping that nightmare from swallowing the decades of art and activism that made them so cherished in Hollywood.

More recently, the family of special-effects visionary Screaming Mad George waited months before announcing his death, also this past weekend. The cult filmmaker and artist died in February at age 69 of cardiac arrest after several years of documented health problems, but the news was only just shared. Having grieved privately, his family invited the public to then celebrate the artist behind the “shunting” in “Society,” the cockroach transformation in “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4,” and a career devoted to finding beauty in the grotesque. They created a rare separation between private loss and public remembrance that the nature of Panettiere’s death could never allow. 

Most celebrity deaths do not allow for that separation, meaning movie lovers must create it for themselves. That does not mean pretending Panettiere’s struggles never existed. Rather, it suggests preserving the duality her career was built around — instead of replacing it with the duality her death now suggests. We can resist turning every interview into evidence and every performance into prophecy because fans do not need to solve Hayden Panettiere’s death to explain why they are grieving her.