I was 9 years old when I watched Hayden Panettiere star as Channing Walsh in 2005's Racing Stripes—a sweet, if not forgettable film about a zebra with horse-racing ambitions—then as Gen Harwood in Ice Princess shortly after. A year later, I followed along as she stunted and danced alongside Solange Knowles in Bring It On: All or Nothing, an eventual cult classic that transformed sleepovers everywhere for the better. Then, in 2012, I finally sat down to watch 2000's Remember the Titans (I know, I know—sacrilege for a sports journalist), in which a spunky Panettiere plays the ball-loving, fast-talking Sheryl Yoast, a 9.5-year-old pipsqueak who refuses to abandon her love of the gridiron for more ... feminine pursuits, let’s say.
To me—and I can only assume millions of Millennial women who grew up on Disney Channel Original Movies and Meg Cabot adaptations—Panettiere was the preteen version of Tom Cruise. The movie star of all movie stars. The girl who just wouldn't quit. Sure, she wasn’t jumping out of planes or traversing down mountains, but in my 10-year-old mind, she did pretty much everything else. She could ice skate. She could cheer. She could call football plays with the military precision of Coach Herman Boone. And she looked totally cool while doing it.
The roles she took on and performed with such dexterity were layered, complicated and significant, even at an early age, and I’d argue that her frequent work in a sort-of-sports subgenre—a common thread throughout her films—did more for this era of girlhood than we may have realized. In fact, her indelible turn as Yoast is perhaps the perfect example of this. I might have been a touch closer to the formative end zone by the time I saw Remember the Titans, but I can only imagine how impactful Sheryl’s refusal to back down and her persistent attempts to keep up with the boys—even when urged otherwise—might have been for those closer to the 50-yard line.
Intentionally or not, Panettiere and her earliest movies served as a constant and needed reminder of how sport can challenge, uplift and transform women and girls, whether they’re flying in a cheer formation, twirling in the rink or saddling up to ride. And when you’re 7 years old and trying to fit in, that representation goes a long, long way.
On Sunday, Panettiere died inside an apartment in Greenville, S.C., just days shy of her 37th birthday. An exact cause of death was not immediately clear—first responders said they found the actress in cardiac arrest—but the pessimistic read is that this loss marks yet another casualty among the tragedy-laced ranks of former child stars, a club often plagued by poor mental health, rampant alcoholism and insidious drug use.
Panettiere, for her part, had been open about her experience with all three. Sometimes, her work even mirrored such narratives from her life, as was the case on Nashville, when writers incorporated her issues with postpartum depression and substance abuse into the show's storyline.
“As my nervous system tried to regulate itself without the depressant effects of alcohol, it went into overdrive, and my whole body shook, I couldn’t sleep, and my head pounded like it was pressing against my skull […],” the actress wrote in her recently released memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, describing a piece of her eight-month rehab stay in 2020. “A doctor told me that if I didn’t stop drinking, I’d be dead within five years.”
We are often forced to reckon with what we have lost only after we lose it. Such is unfortunately the case with Panettiere, whose performances shaped a generation and whose life deserved the second act she so clearly craved. That she is gone so soon after opening herself back up to the public, after surviving those five years and then some, is a tragedy that cannot be overstated, and another reminder of the pitfalls of show business, a line of work that often takes far, far more than it gives.
Still, we will remember Panettiere just as her version of Yoast once called for us to remember that football team in Alexandria, Va. In this way, she will live on in the frames of her films, the impact of which stretched far beyond the box office; in the eyes and heart of her young daughter, Kaya, whom she leaves behind; and in the lives of the millions of young girls, now women, who—whether they realize it or not—learned to love pieces of themselves in the stories she so meaningfully told on screen.
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