Hayden Panettiere Made Her Acting Debut In A Classic ABC Soap Opera

The death of Hayden Panettiere has inspired a reflection on her acting career. While she's best known for "Heroes" (which had one of the best 1st seasons of all time), her TV acting debut was on a classic ABC soap opera: "One Life to Live." As a child, from 1994 to 1997, Panettiere played Sarah Roberts, the daughter of Tina Lord (Andrea Evans) and Cord Roberts (John Loprieno). 

Panettiere left a lasting impression due to the heavy storylines she was featured in alongside veteran actors. This included Erika Slezak, who starred as Victoria "Viki" Lord, the Lord family matriarch, who navigated dissociative identity disorder brought on from childhood trauma. During one of their scenes, now on YouTube, Sarah confronted Victoria as one of her alter egos, Jean Randolph, surfaced: "What are you hiding from us, Aunt Viki?"

Although Panettiere acknowledged in her 2026 memoir, "This Is Me: A Reckoning," that she didn't have many lines, she quickly absorbed the dialogue she was given. "At that age, my brain was a sponge," she wrote in the New York Times bestseller. "Every night, I could memorize more than the day before and recall them more quickly on the car ride to set." She continued, "I learned how to cram when I was five." Panettiere completed her "One Life to Live" run three years after joining the cast, and she immediately jumped into another famous daytime soap.

Hayden Panettiere made good use of the training she went through on "One Life to Life" when she transitioned to "Guiding Light." Between 1997 and 2000, she played the role of Lizzie Spaulding, who also went through some rather harrowing storylines. "They threw me down a well," she shared with Stephen Colbert in 2017 (via EW). "I got leukemia, not once but twice. I was kidnapped ... I shot my mom's boyfriend," she continued.

If Lizzie was in a scene, then tears were also on the horizon — and that was by design. While promoting her memoir, she recalled her ability to cry on demand and claimed that "Guiding Light" producers responded by crafting emotional scenes for her. "Once they figured that out, it was just like, I never stopped crying," she said in May 2026 (via Page Six).

Unfortunately, the emotional scenes made Panettiere access negative emotions. "You go through life experiences, and the imagery," she said. "You then have to go to places that you bring yourself [to that] are so dark and so ugly. And you're sitting there, then afterwards, getting praise and love for it. You're going, 'Oh my God, when I feel pain, I get love.'"