Yahoo Lifestyle Michelle Trachtenberg, ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ Actor, Dies at 39
Michelle Trachtenberg, the actor best known for film and television roles including “Gossip Girl” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” has died. She was 39.
She was found unconscious and unresponsive Wednesday in her Manhattan apartment, according to the New York City police department. According to the New York Post, which first reported the news, she had recently undergone a liver transplant. Trachtenberg’s cause of death has not been confirmed, but the NYPD said criminality was not suspected.
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In a statement, NYPD said that officers responded to a 911 call just after 8 a.m. and Trachtenberg was pronounced dead by emergency medical workers, who also responded to the scene.
“It is with great sadness to confirm that Michelle Trachtenberg has passed away,” her publicist Gary Mantoosh said in a statement. “The family requests privacy for their loss. There are no further details at this time.”
Born in New York on Oct. 11, 1985, Trachtenberg began acting at a young age. She was 3 years old when she began appearing in commercials and soon after landed her first TV credit, on the Nickelodeon series “The Adventures of Pete & Pete,” which aired in the mid 1990s. By age 10, she scored her first starring film role in 1996’s “Harriet the Spy,” in which she played the eponymous aspiring sleuth opposite Rosie O’Donnell and J. Smith-Cameron.
Trachtenberg’s breakthrough, however, was playing Dawn Summers on the teen drama “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which ran on the WB in the early aughts. Trachtenberg joined the popular show in its fifth season as the younger sister of Sarah Michelle Geller’s Buffy Summers and remained on the series through its seventh and final season in 2003.
She found further success on another teen drama, portraying the agent of chaos known as Georgina Sparks on “Gossip Girl,” which ran from 2007 to 2012. Trachtenberg’s character, a diabolical Manhattan socialite, regularly found herself feuding, or blackmailing, with Blake Lively’s Serena van der Woodsen and Leighton Meester’s Blair Waldorf. She briefly reprised her role on HBO Max’s “Gossip Girl” reboot in 2022.
Trachtenberg has a long list of genre-spanning credits on the big and small screen. Her film roles include 2004’s “Eurotrip,” the raunchy teen comedy that popularized the fictional song “Scotty Doesn’t Know,” and 2005’s “Ice Princess,” a comparatively wholesome film about a nerdy high schooler with a passion for figure skating. She also starred in 2009’s “17 Again” with Zac Efron and Matthew Perry as well as episodes of TV shows such as “Law & Order,” “Clarissa Explains It All,” “All My Children,” “Six Feet Under” and “Weeds.”
In 2021, Trachtenberg spoke out in support of her fellow “Buffy” actor Charisma Carpenter who alleged the series creator Joss Whedon subjected Carpenter to “inappropriate and cruel behavior on set.” Trachtenberg reposted a statement from Geller with the caption, “I am brave enough now as a 35-year-old woman to repost this. Because this must. Be known. As a teenager. With his not appropriate behavior. Very. Not. Appropriate. There was a rule. Saying. He’s not allowed in a room alone with Michelle again.” Whedon has denied the allegations.
Smith-Cameron, her co-star on “Harriet the Spy,” once described a preteen Trachtenberg as “this very appealing, bubbly, very beautiful child star from Nickelodeon.”
“It was like everything was taking off for her. But she was sweet about it,” Smith-Cameron told Vulture in a 2021 interview about filming the kid-friendly movie. “I just remember her taking it very seriously. A true professional.”
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