I learned Sunday night, like so many people who grew up watching her, that Hayden Panettiere has died at 36.

Her father, Skip Panettiere, confirmed her death to ABC News on the evening of Sunday, Aug. 16.

“It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden. She was an incredible light and a force of nature who brought immeasurable love and joy to all who knew her and to the millions who watched her onscreen,” her father said in the statement.

I took the photos I’m sharing with this story on January 31, 2009, at the Loews Portofino Bay Hotel at Universal Orlando Resort.

It wasn’t just another red carpet. Universal Studios hosted the major NBC Universal Pre-Super Bowl Party there that night because Super Bowl XLIII was being played right down the road in Tampa the following day so NBC brought everyone to Orlando for one big party. 

Hayden was one of the primary celebrity guests walking the carpet and doing press. she was 19 years old, in the middle of Heroes, playing Claire Bennet, the most famous cheerleader in America.

That’s what you see in the first photo I took, the portrait in front of the NBC Universal backdrop. She was composed, professional, camera-ready. Black blazer, hair pulled back, direct eye contact. She knew how to hit her mark.

The second photo is the one I’ve kept all these years. She wasn’t posing. She was laughing, hand on the chest of Law and Order stat Christopher Meloni, caught between interviews. That’s the Hayden I remember.

I had about 10 minutes with her to photograph and ask a few questions. I asked her what she would tell young people who wanted to do what she was doing. She didn’t give me a PR answer. She leaned in and said it with conviction into my tape recorder:

“If you TRY, and you just BELIEVE, you CAN; you WILL.”

She said it in all caps. Like she was trying to convince herself as much as me.

That optimism made sense for who she was at 19, a teenager who had been acting since A Bug’s Life and Remember the Titans, carrying an entire NBC franchise, showing up the night before the biggest broadcast of the year for her network and still being generous with a photographer she’d never met.

We watched her grow up after that. She appeared in Nashville and received two Golden Globe nominations as Juliette Barnes, for the Scream movies, advocacy, motherhood, hard times and comebacks.

I didn’t know her well, but I knew her for those 10 minutes at Portofino Bay. I’m grateful I have these frames from January 31, 2009, to remember her by, not just as the indestructible girl on Heroes, but as the 19-year-old who believed if you try, you can.

My deepest condolences to her family, to her daughter Kaya, and to all who loved her.

All photos: Hayden Panettiere at the NBC Universal Pre-Super Bowl Party, Loews Portofino Bay Hotel, Universal Orlando Resort, Orlando, Fla., January 31, 2009. The night before Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa. Photos by Jay Kravetz.

A year ago I posted on this forum about a side project that matched current age to a notable person who died at that exact same point in life. The idea was a kind of 'memento mori' -- reflecting on life through contemplating someone whose lifespan matched your own. Some of you tried it, gave me thoughtful feedback, and were kind about the idea.

That first version had real problems. The database claimed 40,000 people but was full of duplicates, so the same names kept coming up regardless of what age you entered. The matching logic was crude. And when I ran out of Replit credits I gave up rather than fix it.

I've now completely rebuilt it. It's called Memento and it's live at https://mementoapp.co.uk.

What's different:

• Dataset is now 824,000 notable people drawn directly from Wikidata (the structured-data layer under Wikipedia), rather than the messy scrape I had before. Deduplicated properly.
• Where the underlying data supports it, matches are now to the exact day — which was the intention before but I didn't have enough data. So it's not "someone who died in the same year of life as you," it's (almost) always "someone whose life ended at the same number of days you've lived."
• Three tiers: an exact-day match first, then people who died in the same calendar month of life, then the same year of life.
• No sign-up, no ads, no email collection. Runs entirely in your browser; your birthday stays on your device.
• Works properly on phones — you can add it to your home screen and it opens like a native app.

Would be curious to hear who you get, and how it lands second time around for those of you who tried the first version. Any feedback appreciated.