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.
