Hayden Panettiere Once Compared Herself to ‘Finding Nemo’s’ Dory: I ‘Keep Swimming, Even When Face to Face With a Bunch of Sharks’

The late actress revealed her struggles in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, which has returned to number one on the charts following her passing

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Viewers watched Hayden Panettiere grow up in front of the cameras as a child star on soap operas One Life to Live and Guiding Light, and later as a TV show fixture on network hits like Heroes and Nashville. But while the actress’ career cemented her as a rising star in Hollywood, she was silently paying the price of fame behind the scenes, battling tabloid scrutiny and the unrealistic expectations that had been placed on her by both outside critics and the people closest to her in her life.

The late actress revealed her struggles in her 2026 memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, which has returned to number one on Amazon’s biographies chart following the news of Panettiere’s unexpected death on Sunday.

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This Is Me: A Reckoning

This Is Me: A Reckoning is released by Grand Central Publishing and has 320 pages.

While Panettiere was lauded in interviews and on the cover of countless magazines as a smart and savvy “it girl” for a new generation of stars, she wrote that her reality was far more complicated. A tumultuous relationship with her mother (who was also her manager) led Panettiere to feel increasingly like a commodity rather than an artist, and the actress said she struggled to keep up with expectations on everything from her weight to her work ethic.

Though she continued to achieve success as an adult, Panettiere’s personal life began to suffer, and she wrote openly about being in the depths of addiction and domestic abuse. In 2014, Panettiere gave birth to a daughter with boxer Wladimir Klitschko, but she quickly descended into a deep postpartum depression. As she told the hosts of The View during an interview to promote her book in May, she struggled with the desire to be a better mother to her daughter than her mother was to her, but couldn’t get out of a funk that left her bedridden for days at a time. Panettiere relinquished full custody of her daughter Kaya to Klitschko in 2018 amid her struggles with addiction and postpartum, admitting in the book that, “Not being with her under the same roof [as Kaya] has been the most gut-wrenching experience of my life.”

Panettiere also struggled to deal with the death of her brother, Jansen, in 2023, though she had seemingly begun to finally make peace with the tragedy. “He would want me to remember that death and loss are part of life, but they allow rebirth if you let them,” she wrote in her book.

The Golden Globe-nominated actress also compared herself to another famous movie star: “I’m like Dory, the resilient little fish in Finding Nemo who just keeps swimming even when she comes face to face with a bunch of sharks,” she wrote. “Life can shake you up and tear you down, but even when you’re at your worst, there’s hope, and you have an opportunity to rebuild.”

A rep confirmed the actress’ passing to news outlets on Sunday (Aug. 16). Panettiere was 36.