Hayden Leslie Panettiere was born on 21st August 1989 in Palisades, New York, to actress Lesley Vogel and fire department captain Skip Panettiere. Her younger brother is actor Jansen Panettiere. She has Italian, and some English and German, ancestry. Her mother got her started in the business by doing commercials when she was just 11 months old. Then, at only 4 1/2, she was cast on the soap opera On ne vit qu'une fois (1968), where she remained until 1997. Since then, she has gone on to appear in many feature films and TV movies. But she is probably best known in the United States for her role as "Claire" on the hit TV show, Heroes (2006).
As for movies, Hayden starred in Le plus beau des combats (2000) with Denzel Washington and Super papa (2001) with Tim Allen. When Hayden isn't working, she enjoys singing, dancing, horseback riding, gymnastics, taking piano lessons, and swimming.
She has been involved with many animated movies, beginning with 1001 pattes (1998) as "Dot", later to follow was Dinosaure (2000), the video game Kingdom Hearts (2002), and The Mark of Kri (2002). Her next movie is Zig Zag, l'étalon zébré (2005), a partly animated film, but Hayden will star in the human role; other cast members include the voices of Whoopi Goldberg, Dustin Hoffman, Joshua Jackson and Mandy Moore.
In 2003, she joined the likes of Jessica Lange, Tom Wilkinson and Clancy Brown in Jane Anderson's Normal (2003), a film about a Midwestern husband and father who announces his plans to have a sex-change operation. In July of the same year, Hayden appeared in a John Guare play, "Landscape of the Body", for the Williamstown theater festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
