Hayden Panettiere began acting when she was just 11 months old. She was pushed to perfection to the point that she had no say in it.
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Add BollywoodShaadis on GoogleHayden Panettiere's sudden death has sent shockwaves through her fans. The cause of Panettiere's death has still not been revealed, and people are revisiting her life and the tragedies she faced since she first appeared in front of the camera. Not many people know this, but Hayden was pushed into acting, and she never had a say in it.
Hayden began acting in 1990, before she was even one. She first appeared in a commercial before transitioning into TV. By the age of 4, Hayden landed the role of ‘Sarah Roberts’ on the soap opera One Life to Live. Hayden eventually became a household name for her roles in Heroes and Nashville.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hayden revealed that she had no options and nothing to fall back on. The actress, who never went to college, was pushed into the entertainment business, where she worked like a soldier. Speaking of the same, she said:
“I think it’s the way I was raised. I was groomed. I was like a little soldier, and I always have been. No was never an option. It was just, 'Here are your scenes, here’s your dialogue, memorize it, hit the marks, do what your director tells you to do.' I took my marching orders.”
But when she started harming herself with substance abuse, only then did Hayden realise how abnormal her upbringing was in the entertainment world. Her life started building up for others, and she began pleasing people, keeping herself as the lowest priority. The pressure of not taking a stand for herself built up so much that she took solace in addiction.
Hayden’s mother, Lesley Vogel, managed her career from childhood. Lesley, a former soap actress, was the one who got Panettiere’s career started as a baby model. She made her screen debut in a toy train commercial when she was just 11 months old. Hayden often recalled her mother’s anger when she failed to book a role.
She once superglued a fallen tooth back into Hayden’s mouth so that she wouldn’t lose out on a role. In her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, Hayden wrote that when she lost her right front tooth at the age of eight, her mom took her to a dentist to set her up with a fake tooth. Penning about the same, she wrote:
“A nice dental assistant took a mould of my top teeth, and Dr Bob explained to me and Mom that a flipper is a retainer with an acrylic ‘palate. However, because a flipper doesn’t straighten anything, there are no wires. When I put the flipper in my mouth, no one would know I’d lost a tooth. I dutifully handed Mom the tooth and watched her squeeze a dab of superglue onto it. Then she affixed the tooth to the flipper.”
However, over the years, her relationship with her mom turned sour. The Heroes alum said she eventually mustered the courage to end their professional relationship when she was 19. But the response she got from her shattered her. Speaking about the same in Jay Shetty’s podcast, Hayden said:
“I said to her, ‘I don’t want us to work together anymore. I just want you to be my mom. But I also wasn’t expecting the reaction I got: ‘You owe me.’ And that’s all she said. And she walked out. It was disappointing to find out that it was money.”
At the age when kids went out to play, Hayden Panettiere was pushed into showbiz without any other option.
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