‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘Buffy’ Star Was 39

Michelle Trachtenberg, the veteran actress who started as a child performer with high profile roles like title character Harriet the Spy before finding success on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gossip Girl and the comedy EuroTrip, has died. She was 39.

The New York Post was first to report the news of her death.

Trachtenberg was born in New York as the daughter of Jewish immigrants. In a radio interview in 2005, she confirmed that she was fluent in Russian as her mother was born in Russia and it was the only way for her to communicate with her grandparents.

She landed her first role in the most New York of ways by appearing in an episode of Law & Order in 1991. She segued to more kid-friendly fare courtesy of Nickelodeon with a role on the Melissa Joan Hart-starrer Clarissa Explains it All and later with a 14-episode run on The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Then, like her future Buffy co-star Sarah Michelle Gellar, Trachtenberg worked on the New York soap All My Children. Her breakout turn as a child performer came also from Nickelodeon when she landed the title role in the 1996 film Harriet the Spy opposite veteran performers like Rosie O’Donnell, Eartha Kitt and J. Smith-Cameron. She was 10 years old at the time.

The family later moved to Brooklyn where she was raised with an older sister, Irene. At the age of 12, after her career started to take off propelled by the Nickelodeon work, Trachtenberg moved to Los Angeles to pursue more work though she stated that she remained “bicoastal for a little bit.”

“It was a little more sheltered,” she once said of her life in Brooklyn before moving to the West Coast. “What was a really big switch for me was going from a place where entertainment was prominent, but not surrounding, and in LA, I feel like you’re constantly surrounded by people in the entertainment business.”

The work kept coming through the late 1990s, and she landed a series regular role on 1997’s Meego opposite Bronson Pinchot, Ed Begley Jr., Jonathan Lipnicki and Will Estes followed by appearances in the films Inspector Gadget and Can’t Be Heaven.

TV delivered yet another breakout moment as she was cast as Dawn Summers opposite Gellar in the beloved and cult classic Buffy. Summers, the younger sister of the title character, debuted in the first episode of the show’s fifth season, and she appeared in every episode of Buffy’s remaining three-season run.

“I had known Sarah since we worked together on All My Children. We worked together for about two and half years, and we had kept in touch through the years when she moved to Hollywood and began building her career from that point,” Trachtenberg told the BBC of joining Buffy. “I kept in touch with Sarah through the years, and because Buffy had become my real favorite show, I had always tried to think of ways for me to guest star on the show, and I heard about the call one day. Sarah was always very supportive.”

More to come.