You remember something when you learn that Hayden Panettiere is only five feet and one inch tall. She spent ten years in front of audiences playing characters who seemed huge. This isn’t especially surprising in Hollywood, where the camera can change the size of things. Claire Bennet on Heroes. Juliette Barnes talks about Nashville. There were women who added weight to every scene they were in. There was always a gap between how she looked in real life and how she appeared on screen, and that gap tells you something real about who she is.
According to the records, Panettiere is about 5’1″, which is about 153 centimeters tall. But she once disputed that number herself. In 2011, she sharply corrected the record on Twitter: “I’m 5’2′ thank you very much ; )” — punctuation and all. Whether that extra inch is measurable or aspirational probably depends on the shoes. Either way, it’s a small change that she felt was important enough to make in public.
People may have been curious about her height for a long time because of the person she dated. From 2009 to 2018, Panettiere was dating Wladimir Klitschko, the Ukrainian heavyweight boxing champion, who is six feet and six inches tall. There is a 17-inch difference between the two, which many people found awkward. When she went on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2011, the topic almost certainly came up. She said that strangers, usually conservative ones, would approach her and ask the obvious question. “They just have to know,” she said. She dealt with it with humor, which seems like the only sensible thing to do when people you’ve never met ask you about your private life.
It’s not often called attention to short women in Hollywood, but it does happen. Panettiere started acting in a commercial when she was eleven months old, and by 1994, when she was five, she was working as a professional actress on the daytime show One Life to Live. She voiced characters in Kingdom Hearts and appeared in Remember the Titans, Bring It On: All or Nothing, and Ice Princess, building a career that spanned decades and genres. Her height never got in the way of her career, but it did become a topic of conversation in her personal life from time to time.
When we look back, it’s interesting to see how she refused to treat it as a liability over and over again. In situations like that Ellen interview, she seemed calm—not defensive, but with a kind of settled amusement. She thot the questions were funny, she answered them directly, and she moved on. That’s not nothing, especially in a business where image management can become much more anxious and controlled.
The book she wrote, This Is Me: A Reckoning, promises a fuller picture of a life that has been both very public and, in important ways, very private. She writes about things like child custody, rehab, and coming out as bisexual—things that most people didn’t see. The height gap with Klitschko was the part of her life that fit easily into tabloid stories; the rest was harder to contain.
