Hayden Panettiere’s 10 Best Roles To Remember Her By

Published Aug 25, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT After joining Screen Rant in January 2025, Guy became a Senior Features Writer in March of the same year, and now specializes in features about classic TV shows. With several years' experience writing for and editing TV, film and music publications, his areas of expertise include a wide range of genres, from comedies, animated series, and crime dramas, to Westerns and political thrillers. From child star to TV lead and horror franchise fixture, Hayden Panettiere played a remarkable range of roles in her 30-year screen career. She very often stole whatever show she was in, and often expressed regret that she didn’t spend more time building her movie career during the 2010s. The news that Panettiere has died at the age of 36 has shocked the world, and understandably caused widespread grief among those who’ve grown up watching her performances. The actor first appeared on our screens way back in 1994, as four-year-old Sarah Roberts in the ABC soap opera One Life to Live. She then transitioned into cinema through supporting roles in several successful movies, before becoming a household name playing main characters in some of the biggest TV series of her generation. Although Panettiere largely disappeared from public view in 2018 to focus on her health, her return to the screen in 2022 prompted a career resurgence. At the time of her death, she’d starred in at least one release in each of the past five years. Panettiere’s best movies and TV shows demonstrate the breadth of her talent, and constitute a body of work that will be remembered for a long time to come. While she’s gone all too soon, she leaves us with countless memorable performances in a variety of genres. 10 Remember the Titans Sheryl Yoast One of the oldest releases on this list, Remember the Titans helped launch Hayden Panettiere’s movie career. A sports drama starring Denzel Washington as a high school football coach in Virginia, during an era of racial tension. A 10-year-old Panettiere plays Sheryl Yoast, the daughter of the team’s assistant coach. She brings attitude and energy to the role, as a girl who rejects gender stereotypes and loves the sport her father teaches. Panettiere also narrates the movie as Sheryl, a particularly challenging feat for an actor as young as she was at the time. Yet, she takes it in her stride, acting far beyond her years with flair and vigor. 9 Tiger Cruise Maddie Dolan An underrated Disney Channel movie co-starring Hayden Panettiere’s also-deceased younger brother Jansen, Tiger Cruise has more emotional substance to it than most teen dramas of its kind. It sees a young girl grappling with the harsh reality of living with a U.S. Navy commander as a father. Featuring one of the more sensitive reactions to 9/11 to be depicted onscreen, this forgotten small-screen feature was among Panettiere’s first projects as a lead actor, and showcases the natural talent she had at an early age. She does most of the emotional heavy lifting in the movie, and her performance is well worth revisiting. 8 Amber Alert Jacqueline "Jaq" Dana Hayden Panettiere’s last major role before her death, Amber Alert is a Hulu procedural thriller with Abbott Elementary’s Tyler James Williams as its co-lead. It tells the story of a child abduction which its two central characters end up investigating after a chance encounter. Amber Alert’s ending isn’t exactly groundbreaking, and the movie overall feels fairly run-of-the-mill. But Panettiere’s performance as rideshare passenger Jacqueline "Jaq" Dana elevates its story to a level we can fully engage with, illustrating the sparkling onscreen charisma she could apply to almost any script. 7 A Bug's Life Princess Dot Perhaps the best Pixar movie almost nobody remembers, A Bug’s Life is a masterful allegory for colonization, in the form of a showdown between hardworking ants and parasitical grasshoppers. In her first performance of any repute, Hayden Panettiere voices the ant queen’s wide-eyed younger daughter Princess Dot. She was only eight years old at the time she recorded her part, yet she’s one of the best things in the film. She plays the lively back-and-forth between her character and Dave Foley’s protagonist Flik especially well. Thanks to her performance in A Bug’s Life, Panettiere soon landed another voice role, in Disney’s impressively animated prehistoric adventure movie Dinosaur. 6 Ally McBeal Maddie Harrington By the time she was introduced as a main character in the fifth and final season of Ally McBeal, Hayden Panettiere was well used to playing characters wise beyond their years. From nowhere, she arrives in the titular lawyer’s life fully-formed as her precocious 10-year-old daughter, but manages to make this unlikely storyline work. Although Ally McBeal laid the blueprint for legal comedy-drama Suits, it’s more surreal and much less serious, stylistic elements that Panettiere leans into in her portrayal of Maddie Harrington. She might have only been around for 10 episodes, but fans of the show have never forgotten her. 5 Bring It On: All or Nothing Britney Allen The third movie in the Bring It On series about competitive high-school cheerleaders is considered the best of its straight-to-video sequels among many viewers. It might not be the most profound piece of storytelling that Hayden Panettiere has ever been a part of, but it has genuine nostalgia value for audiences of a certain age. What’s more, the movie demonstrates Panettiere’s talent for physical performance, which hadn’t played a significant part in her career up to that point. She’s an immensely likable lead performer, and radiates the star quality that would propel her to global TV fame in the years immediately following this release. 4 Malcolm In The Middle Jessica One of Hayden Panettiere’s most complex characters, Jessica is a young tearaway who ends up treating Malcolm’s family home as a place of refuge, while driving him and his brothers to distraction. Just as smart as the show’s titular boy genius in her own way, she’s a master manipulator who plays on his insecurities and emotional frailties. Sadly, Malcolm in the Middle’s recent reboot didn’t answer the questions many fans were asking about what happened to Jessica. Across just five episodes in 2005, Panettiere makes her presence felt, and remains one of the family sitcom’s most memorable characters. A return in this year’s revival miniseries would have been very welcome. 3 Scream 4 / Scream / Scream VI Kirby Reed One of Hayden Panettiere’s most iconic roles, Kirby Reed is the greatest sidekick in the history of the Scream franchise. A symbol of strong femininity who’s always up for a fight and has a wicked sense of humor, Kirby is the character Panettiere had been building towards for over a decade before she got the part in Scream 4. It’s no surprise that she’s such a beloved figure among longtime devotees of the franchise. Kirby’s cineliterate love of horror even makes her feel like one of the hands. Hayden Panettiere was sorely missed in Scream 7 as a result. 2 Heroes Claire Bennet The part that turned Panettiere into a major star, Claire Bennet is a true survivor whose resilience is her real superpower. Morally complex and deeply flawed, she’s intensely relatable in ways that ultimately depend on the grounded, heartfelt performance of the actor playing her. Claire is ultimately a tragic character whose supernatural powers work against her in psychological terms. Later offshoots of Heroes reveal that Claire dies after having the children of the final villain in the franchise. She’s surely a figure that it was easy for Hayden Panettiere herself to identify with. 1 Nashville Juliette Barnes Panettiere’s time on Nashville was a traumatic experience for her overall, as she didn’t get the support she needed from those around her behind the scenes, and her character’s storylines cut too close to the bone in the way they seemed to reflect her personal life. Nevertheless, she gives an extraordinary performance as ambitious but troubled country singer Juliette Barnes. Nashville revealed that Hayden Panettiere had pipes in addition to her acting talent. Still, it’s the actor’s hard-hitting portrayal of Juliette’s emotional and psychological struggles as her career takes off that makes this series-defining role so special. Release Date 2012 - 2018-00-00 Network ABC, CMT Directors Callie Khouri, Stephen Cragg, Michael Lohmann, Allan Arkush, Julie Hébert, Michael Waxman, Paul McCrane, Arlene Sanford, Dan Lerner, Eric Stoltz, Jean de Segonzac, Lily Mariye, Mario Van Peebles, Mike Binder, Timothy Busfield, Bethany Rooney, Dawn Wilkinson, Devon Gummersall, Eric Close, Jan Eliasberg, Ron Underwood, Sanaa Hamri, Patrick R. Norris, Jet Wilkinson Cast Hayden Panettiere Juliette Barnes Clare Bowen Scarlett O'Connor